A practical guide to global illumination using photon mapping
Per Christensen | Henrik Wann Jensen | Frank Suykens |
Contact: Computer Graphics Research Group
ACM SIGGRAPH 2001 Course Notes 38, p. 60-90
Los Angeles, CA, USA, 12-17 August 2001
Abstract
An advanced half-day course on efficient and practical implementation of global illumination and shading algorithms based on photon maps. The presentation covers efficient techniques and data structures for generating photon maps, including projection maps and Russian-roulette-based sampling; how to efficiently integrate information from photon maps in shading algorithms to render global illumination effects such as caustics, color bleeding, and participating media; how to use importance to build more efficient and compact photon maps; and several useful and practical tricks that significantly improve the speed of the photon map method.
Prerequisites: A good working knowledge of global illumination algorithms, especially Monte Carlo ray-tracing-based methods.
Keywords: photon tracing, photon scattering, building the photon map, rendering of caustics, color bleeding, participating media (including subsurface scattering), visual importance, recent research in photon mapping