Visual Computing

Efficiently computing light transport in participating media in a manner that is robust to variations in media density, scattering albedo, and anisotropy is a difficult and important problem in realistic image synthesis.

We focus on the latter of these problems and present an approach that captures and factorizes external lighting in a manner that allows for realistic relighting of both animated and static virtual objects.

We present progressive photon beams, a new algorithm for rendering complex lighting in participating media.

We present several techniques to alleviate this limitation, allowing the light transport from clutter in a scene to be accounted for.

Modular Radiance Transfer (MRT) models coarse-scale, distant indirect lighting effects in scene geometry that scales from high-end GPUs to low-end mobile platforms. MRT eliminates scene dependent precomputation by storing compact transport on simple shapes, akin to bounce cards used in film production.

This talk complements a technical paper and focuses on implementation issues, including how our run time is designed to scale across many different platforms, from iPhones to modern GPUs.

In this paper, we derive a physically based model for simulating rainbows. Previous techniques for simulating rainbows have used either geometric optics (ray tracing) or Lorenz-Mie theory.

We present Virtual Beam Lights (VBLs), a progressive many-lights algorithm for rendering complex indirect transport paths in, from, and to media.

In this paper, we propose a parametric density estimation technique that represents radiance using a hierarchical Gaussian mixture.

We present algorithms for constructing SHADOWPIX that allow up to four images to be embedded in a single surface. SHADOWPIX can produce a variety of unusual effects depending on the embedded images: moving the light can animate or relight the object in the image, or three colored lights may be used to produce a single colored image.