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.

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.

Rasterization hardware provides interactive frame rates for rendering dynamic scenes, but lacks the ability of ray tracing required for efficient global illumination simulation. Existing ray tracing based methods yield high quality renderings but are far too slow for interactive use. We present a new parallel global illumination algorithm that perfectly scales, has minimal preprocessing and communication overhead, applies highly efficient sampling techniques based on randomized quasi-Monte Carlo integration, and benefits from a fast parallel ray tracing implementation by shooting coherent groups of rays. Thus a performance is achieved that allows for applying arbitrary changes to the scene, while simulating global illumination including shadows from area light sources, indirect illumination, specular effects, and caustics at interactive frame rates. Ceasing interaction rapidly provides high quality renderings.

Simulating realistic lighting and rendering complex scenes are usually considered separate problems with incompatible solutions. Accurate lighting calculations are typically performed using ray tracing algorithms, which require that the entire scene database reside in memory to perform well. Conversely, most systems capable of rendering complex scenes use scan-conversion algorithms that access memory coherently, but are unable to incorporate sophisticated illumination. We have developed algorithms that use caching and lazy creation of texture and geometry to manage scene complexity. To improve cache performance, we increase locality of reference by dynamically reordering the rendering computation based on the contents of the cache. We have used these algorithms to compute images of scenes containing millions of primitives, while storing ten percent of the scene description in memory. Thus, a machine of a given memory capacity can render realistic scenes that are an order of magnitude more complex than was previously possible.

This paper introduces Latin supercube sampling (LSS) for very high dimensional simulations, such as arise in particle transport, finance and queuing. LSS is developed as a combination of two widely used methods: Latin hypercube sampling (LHS), and Quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC). In LSS, the input variables are grouped into subsets, and a lower dimensional QMC method is used within each subset. The QMC points are presented in random order within subsets. QMC methods have been observed to lose effectiveness in high dimensional problems. This paper shows that LSS can extend the benefits of QMC to much higher dimensions, when one can make a good grouping of input variables. Some suggestions for grouping variables are given for the motivating examples. Even a poor grouping can still be expected to do as well as LHS. The paper also extends LHS and LSS to infinite dimensional problems. The paper includes a survey of QMC methods, randomized versions of them (RQMC) and previous methods for extending Q...

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 system for interactive computation of global illumination in dynamic scenes. Our system uses a novel scheme for caching the results of a high quality pixel-based renderer such as a bidirectional path tracer. The Shading Cache is an objectspace hierarchical subdivision mesh with lazily computed shading values at its vertices. A high frame rate display is generated from the Shading Cache using hardware-based interpolation and texture mapping. An image space sampling scheme refines the Shading Cache in regions that have the most interpolation error or those that are most likely to be affected by object or camera motion. Our system handles dynamic scenes and moving light sources efficiently, providing useful feedback within a few seconds and high quality images within a few tens of seconds, without the need for any pre-computation. Our approach allows us to significantly outperform other interactive systems based on caching ray-tracing samples, especially in dynamic scenes. Based on our results, we believe that the Shading Cache will be an invaluable tool in lighting design and modelling while rendering.

We describe a new mathematical framework for solving a wide variety of rendering problems based on a non-linear integral scattering equation. This framework treats the scattering functions of complex aggregate objects as first-class rendering primitives; these scattering functions accurately account for all scattering events inside them. We also describe new techniques for computing scattering functions from the composition of scattering objects. We demonstrate that solution techniques based on this new approach can be more efficient than previous techniques based on radiance transport and the equation of transfer and we apply these techniques to a number of problems in rendering scattering from complex surfaces.