Lobachevsky State University of Nizhni Novgorod

Simplified photon mapping for real-time caustics rendering


Project summary

The objective of this project is to implement simplified photon mapping for real-time execution on the GPUs. We developed methods to adjust ray tracing for correct simulation of reflective and transparent objects that generate caustics – areas with dramatically increasing intensity of the light field. High-performance algorithm adapted for the GPU and implemented on the basis of cross-platform OpenGL and OpenCL APIs is proposed. For effective rendering of caustics and generation of photon map OpenGL shaders are used. Voxel acceleration structure constructed directly on the GPU by means of OpenCL provides fast access to photon map. The proposed approach provides for high speed of operations with photon maps including up to 1 million elements with HD resolution (GeForce GTX 280).

Participants

  1. Denis Bogolepov
  2. Dmitry Sopin
  3. Danila Ulyanov

Publications

  1. Ульянов Д.Я. Об одной реализации метода фотонных карт для визуализации каустик // Труды международной научной конференции “Графикон 2010”, cc. 328-359, 20-24 сентября, Санкт-Петербург, Россия, 2010.
  2. Denis Bogolepov, Dmitry Sopin and Vadim Turlapov. Real-time caustics modeling. In Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Computer Graphics and Vision (GraphiCon), pp. 253—257, September 20-24, 2010, St. Petersburg, Russia.
  3. Denis Bogolepov, Dmitry Sopin, Vadim Turlapov. Simplified photon mapping for real-time caustics rendering. To appear in Journal of Numerical Methods and Programming (2011).