Realistic Image Synthesis Using Photon Mapping

Henrik Wann Jensen

Format: Hardcover
Publication Date: July 2001
Publisher: AK Peters
ISBN: 1568811470

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SIAM Review by Bruce Gooch

The creation of photorealistic images of three-dimensional models is central to computer graphics. Photon mapping, an extension of ray tracing, makes it possible to efficiently simulate global illumination in complex scenes. Photon mapping can simulate caustics (focused light, like shimmering waves at the bottom of a swimming pool), diffuse inter-reflections (e.g., the "bleeding" of colored light from a red wall onto a white floor, giving the floor a reddish tint), and participating media (such as clouds or smoke). This book is a practical guide to photon mapping; it provides both the theory and the practical insight necessary to implement photon mapping and simulate all types of direct and indirect illumination efficiently.

1. Introduction

1.1 Realistic Image Synthesis

1.2 Global Illumination

1.3 Overview of this Book

2. Fundamentals of Global Illumination

2.1 The Nature of Light

2.2 Lighting Terminology

2.3 Light Emission

2.4 Light Scattering

2.5 The Rendering Equation

2.6 Light Transport Notation

3. Monte Carlo Ray Tracing

3.1 Classic Ray Tracing

3.2 Path Tracing

3.3 Bidirectional Path Tracing

3.4 Metropolis Light Transport

4. The Photon Mapping Concept

4.1 Motivation

4.2 Developing the Model

4.3 Overview

5. Photon Tracing

5.1 Photon Emission

5.2 Photon Scattering

5.3 Photon Storing

6. The Photon Map Data Structure

6.1 The Data Structure

6.2 Photon Representation

6.3 The Balanced Kd-Tree

6.4 Locating the Nearest Photons Efficiently

7. The Radiance Estimate

7.1 Density Estimation

7.2 Derivation

7.3 Algorithm

7.4 Filtering

7.5 Photon Gathering

8. Visualizing the Photon Map

8.1 Rendering Caustics

8.2 Rendering Color Bleeding

8.3 Fast Approximations

8.4 Caustics Examples

9. A Practical Two-Pass Algorithm

9.1 Overview

9.2 Solving the Rendering Equation

9.3 Pass 1: Photon Tracing

9.4 Pass 2: Rendering

9.5 Examples

10. Participating Media

10.1 Light Scattering in Participating Media

10.2 The Volume Rendering Equation

10.3 The Phase Function

10.4 Ray Marching

10.5 Photon Tracing

10.6 The Volume Radiance Estimate

10.7 Rendering Participating Media

10.8 Subsurface Scattering

10.9 Examples

11. Optimization Strategies

11.1 Irradiance Caching

11.2 Importance Sampling

11.3 Visual Importance

11.4 Efficient Stratification of Photons

11.5 Faster Shadows with Shadow Photons

11.6 Precomputed Irradiance

11.7 Parallel Computations

A. Basic Monte Carlo Integration

A.1 The Sample Mean Method

A.2 Variance-Reduction Techniques

B. A Photon Map Implementation in C++

C. A Cognac Glass Model

Bibliography

Index

Last update: August 5, 2002

henrik@graphics.stanford.edu

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