ACM SIGGRAPH 2001 Course Notes 38, p.60-90, Los Angeles, Calefornia, USA, August 2001.
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.
