We present a new method for the animation and rendering of photorealistic water effects. Our method is designed to produce visually plausible three dimensional effects, for example the pouring of water into a glass (see figure 1) and the breaking of an ocean wave, in a manner which can be used in a computer animation environment. In order to better obtain photorealism in the behavior of the simulated water surface, we introduce a new "thickened" front tracking technique to accurately represent the water surface and a new velocity extrapolation method to move the surface in a smooth, water-like manner. The velocity extrapolation method allows us to provide a degree of control to the surface motion, e.g. to generate a windblown look or to force the water to settle quickly. To ensure that the photorealism of the simulation carries over to the final images, we have integrated our method with an advanced physically based rendering system.

This paper presents a two pass global illumination method based on the concept of photon maps. It represents a significant improvement of a previously described approach both with respect to speed, accuracy and versatility. In the first pass two photon maps are created by emitting packets of energy (photons) from the light sources and storing these as they hit surfaces within the scene. We use one high resolution caustics photon map to render caustics that are visualized directly and one low resolution photon map that is used during the rendering step. The scene is rendered using a distribution ray tracing algorithm optimized by using the information in the photon maps. Shadow photons are used to render shadows more efficiently and the directional information in the photon map is used to generate optimized sampling directions and to limit the recursion in the distribution ray tracer by providing an estimate of the radiance on all surfaces with the exception of specular...

We present a fundamental procedure for instant rendering from the radiance equation. Operating directly on the textured scene description, the very efficient and simple algorithm produces photorealistic images without any finite element kernel or solution discretization of the underlying integral equation. Rendering rates of a few seconds are obtained by exploiting graphics hardware, the deterministic technique of the quasi-random walk for the solution of the global illumination problem, and the new method of jittered low discrepancy sampling.

We present a new Monte Carlo method for solving the light transport problem, inspired by the Metropolis sampling method in computational physics. To render an image, we generate a sequence of light transport paths by randomly mutating a single current path (e.g. adding a new vertex to the path). Each mutation is accepted or rejected with a carefully chosen probability, to ensure that paths are sampled according to the contribution they make to the ideal image. We then estimate this image by sampling many paths, and recording their locations on the image plane. Our algorithm is unbiased, handles general geometric and scattering models, uses little storage, and can be orders of magnitude more e#cient than previous unbiased approaches. It performs especially well on problems that are usually considered di#cult, e.g. those involving bright indirect light, small geometric holes, or glossy surfaces. Furthermore, it is competitive with previous unbiased algorithms even for relatively simple ...

Monte Carlo integration is a powerful technique for the evaluation of difficult integrals. Applications in rendering include distribution ray tracing, Monte Carlo path tracing, and form-factor computation for radiosity methods. In these cases variance can often be significantly reduced by drawing samples from several distributions, each designed to sample well some difficult aspect of the integrand. Normally this is done by explicitly partitioning the integration domain into regions that are sampled differently. We present a powerful alternative for constructing robust Monte Carlo estimators, by combining samples from several distributions in a way that is provably good. These estimators are unbiased, and can reduce variance significantly at little additional cost. We present experiments and measurements from several areas in rendering: calculation of glossy highlights from area light sources, the “final gather” pass of some radiosity algorithms, and direct solution of the rendering equation using bidirectional path tracing.

: This paper presents a new importance sampling strategy for Monte Carlo ray tracing in which a rough estimate of the irradiance based on the photon map is combined with the local reflection model to construct more efficient probability density functions that can be used in an importance sampling scheme. The algorithm gives unbiased results, handles arbitrary reflection models and it is particularly efficient in scenes with highly non-uniform indirect illumination. Initial results and comparisons with traditional importance sampling strategies indicate a reduction in the noise level of more than 70% Key Words: Global Illumination, Path Tracing, Importance Sampling, Photon Map 1 Introduction Photorealistic rendering requires accurate simulation of global illumination and much work has been done in this area in the last 10 years. The problem was actually solved in 1986 by Kajiya [6] using a method called path tracing. This method is basically a brute force Monte Carlo simulat...

Realistic acoustic modeling is essential for spatializing sound in distributed virtual environments where multiple networked users move around and interact visually and aurally in a shared virtual world. Unfortunately, current methods for computing accurate acoustical models are not fast enough for real-time auralization of sounds for simultaneously moving sources and receivers. In this paper, we present three new beam tracing algorithms that greatly accelerate computation of reverberation paths in a distributed virtual environment by taking advantage of the fact that sounds can only be generated or heard at the positions of "avatars" representing the users. The priority-driven beam tracing algorithm performs a bestfirst search of a cell adjacency graph, and thus enables new termination criteria with which all early reflection paths can be found very efficiently. The bidirectional beam tracing algorithm combines sets of beams traced from pairs of avatar locations to find reverberation paths between them while requiring significantly less computation than previous unidirectional algorithms. The amortized beam tracing algorithm computes beams emanating from box-shaped regions of space containing predicted avatar locations and re-uses those beams multiple times to compute reflections paths as each avatar moves inside the box. Cumulatively, these algorithms enable speedups of approximately two orders of magnitude over previous methods. They are incorporated into a time-critical multiprocessing system that allocates its computational resources dynamically in order to compute the highest priority reverberation paths between moving avatar locations in real-time with graceful degradation and adaptive refinement.

In this paper we present a 5D tree structure to cache illumination information gained during Monte Carlo ray tracing. The structure is elegant and simple to use. It is adaptive and makes abstraction of the complexity of the input scene automatically. We then show how the information in this structure can be used to reduce the variance of the Monte Carlo process. Unlike earlier approaches the techniques presented here do not introduce a bias in the results.

In this paper we show how bidirectional path tracing can be extended to handle global illumination effects due to participating media. The resulting image-based algorithm is computationally expensive but more versatile than previous solutions. It correctly handles multiple scattering in non-homogeneous, anisotropic media in complex illumination situations. We illustrate its specific advantages by means of examples.

This paper presents a new technique for rendering caustics on non-Lambertian surfaces. The method is based on an extension of the photon map which removes previous restrictions limiting the usage to Lambertian surfaces. We add information about the incoming direction to the photons and this allows us to combine the photon map with arbitrary reflectance functions. Furthermore we introduce balancing of the photon map which not only reduces the memory requirements but also significantly reduces the rendering time. We have used the method to render caustics on surfaces with reflectance functions varying from Lambertian to glossy specular. Keywords: Caustics, Photon Map, Ray Tracing, Rendering. 1 Introduction Caustics provides some of the most spectacular patterns of light in nature. Caustics are formed when light reflected from or transmitted through a specular surfaces strikes a diffuse surface. An example is the caustic formed as light shines through a glass of wine onto a table. In ...