ABSTRACT
Caustics are detailed patterns of light reflected or refracted on specular surfaces into participating media or onto surfaces. In this paper we present a novel adaptive and scalable algorithm for rendering surface and volume caustics in single-scattering participating media at real-time frame rates. Motivated by both caustic mapping and triangle-based volumetric methods, our technique captures the specular surfaces in light-space, but traces beams of light instead of single photons. The beams are adaptively generated from a grid projected from the light source onto the scene's surfaces, which is iteratively refined according to discontinuities in the geometry and photon distribution. This allows us to reconstruct sharp volume caustic patterns while reducing sampling resolution and fill-rate at defocused regions. We demonstrate our technique combined with approximate ray tracing techniques to render surfaces with two-sided refractions as well as multiple caustic light bounces.
Supplemental Material
- Dachsbacher, C., and Stamminger, M. 2006. Splatting indirect illumination. In Proc. of the 2006 Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games, 93--100. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Dachsbacher, C., Stamminger, M., Drettakis, G., and Durand, F. 2007. Implicit visibility and antiradiance for interactive global illumination. In ACM Trans. on Graphics (Proc. of SIGGRAPH '07), vol. 26(3), 61. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Ernst, M., Akenine-Möller, T., and Jensen, H. W. 2005. Interactive Rendering of Caustics using Interpolated Warped Volumes. Proc. of Graphics Interface, 87--96. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Grün, H., 2010. Direct3d 11 indirect illumination. Presentations at Game Developers Conference.Google Scholar
- Heckbert, P. S., and Hanrahan, P. 1984. Beam Tracing Polygonal Objects. Computer Graphics (Proc. of SIGGRAPH '84), 119--127. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Hu, W., Dong, Z., Ihrke, I., Grosch, T., Yuan, G., and Seidel, H.-P. 2010. Interactive Volume Caustics in Single-scattering Media. In Proc. of the ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games, 109--117. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Ihrke, I., Ziegler, G., Tevs, A., Theobalt, C., Magnor, M., and Seidel, H.-P. 2007. Eikonal Rendering: Efficient Light Transport in Refractive Objects. In ACM Trans. on Graphics (Proc. of SIGGRAPH '07), vol. 26(3), 59. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Iwasaki, K., Dobashi, Y., and Nishita, T. 2002. An Efficient Method for Rendering Optical Effects Using Graphics Hardware. Computer Graphics Forum 21, 4, 701--712.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Jensen, H. W. 2001. Realistic Image Synthesis using Photon Mapping. A. K. Peters, Ltd. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Liktor, G., and Dachsbacher, C. 2010. Real-Time Volumetric Caustics with Projected Light Beams. Proc. of the 5th Hungarian Conf. on Computer Graphics and Geometry, 12--18.Google Scholar
- Lorach, T., 2007. Soft Particles. NVIDIA White Paper.Google Scholar
- Nichols, G., Shopf, J., and Wyman, C. 2009. Hierarchical Image-Space Radiosity for Interactive Global Illumination. Computer Graphics Forum 28, 4, 1141--1149. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Nishita, T., and Nakamae, E. 1994. Method of Displaying Optical Effects within Water using Accumulation Buffer. SIGGRAPH '94, 373--379. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Ramsey, S. D., Potter, K., and Hansen, C. 2004. Ray Bilinear Patch Intersections. Journal of Graphics, GPU, and Game Tools 9, 3, 41--47.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Shah, M. A., Konttinen, J., and Pattanaik, S. 2007. Caustics Mapping: An Image-Space Technique for Real-Time Caustics. IEEE Trans. on Vis. and Computer Graphics 13, 272--280. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Sloan, P.-P., Kautz, J., and Snyder, J. 2002. Precomputed Radiance Transfer for Real-time Rendering in Dynamic, Low-frequency Lighting Environments. In ACM Trans. on Graphics (Proc. of SIGGRAPH '02), vol. 21(3), 527--536. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Sun, X., Zhou, K., Stollnitz, E., Shi, J., and Guo, B. 2008. Interactive Relighting of Dynamic Refractive Objects. In ACM Trans. on Graphics (Proc. of SIGGRAPH '08), vol. 27(3), 1--9. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Szirmay-Kalos, L., Aszódi, B., Lazányi, I., and Premecz, M. 2005. Approximate Ray-Tracing on the GPU with Distance Impostors. Computer Graphics Forum, 695--704.Google Scholar
- Umenhoffer, T., Patow, G., and Szirmay-Kalos, L. 2008. Caustic Triangles on the GPU. Proc. of Computer Graphics International.Google Scholar
- Veach, E., 1997. Robust Monte Carlo Methods for Light Transport Simulation. Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Wang, R., Wang, R., Zhou, K., Pan, M., and Bao, H. 2009. An efficient GPU-based approach for interactive global illumination. In ACM Trans. on Graphics (Proc. of SIGGRAPH '09), vol. 28(3), 1--8. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Wyman, C., and Dachsbacher, C. 2006. Improving ImageSpace Caustics via Variable-Sized Splatting. Journal of Graphics Tools 13, 1.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Wyman, C., and Nichols, G. 2009. Adaptive Caustic Maps Using Deferred Shading. Computer Graphics Forum 28, 2, 309--318.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Wyman, C. 2008. Hierarchical Caustic Maps. Proc. of the 2008 Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games, 163--171. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Yu, J., and McMillan, L. 2004. General linear cameras. In ECCV (2), 14--27.Google Scholar
- Yu, X., Li, F., and Yu, J. 2007. Image-space caustics and curvatures. Computer Graphics and Applications, Pacific Conference on 0, 181--188. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Zhou, K., Hou, Q., Wang, R., and Guo, B. 2008. Real-Time KD-Tree Construction on Graphics Hardware. In ACM Trans. on Graphics (Proc. of SIGGRAPH Asia '08). Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- Real-time volume caustics with adaptive beam tracing
Recommendations
Interactive volume caustics in single-scattering media
I3D '10: Proceedings of the 2010 ACM SIGGRAPH symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and GamesVolume caustics are intricate illumination patterns formed by light first interacting with a specular surface and subsequently being scattered inside a participating medium. Although this phenomenon can be simulated by existing techniques, image ...
Beam tracing polygonal objects
Ray tracing has produced some of the most realistic computer generated pictures to date. They contain surface texturing, local shading, shadows, reflections and refractions. The major disadvantage of ray tracing results from its point-sampling approach. ...
Real-Time Volume Caustics with Image-Based Photon Tracing
CADGRAPHICS '11: Proceedings of the 2011 12th International Conference on Computer-Aided Design and Computer GraphicsRendering of volume caustics in participating media is often expensive, even with different acceleration approaches. Basic volume photon tracing is used to render such effects, but rather slow due to its massive quantity of photons to be traced. In this ...
Comments