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Abstract:
It is difficult to render caustic patterns at interactive frame rates. This
paper introduces new rendering techniques that relax
current constraints, allowing scenes with moving, non-rigid scene
objects, rigid caustic objects, and rotating directional light
sources to be rendered in real-time with GPU hardware
acceleration. Because our algorithm estimates the intensity and
the direction of caustic light, rendering of non-Lambertian
surfaces is supported. Previous caustics algorithms have
separated the problem into pre-rendering and rendering phases,
storing intermediate results in data structures such as photon
maps or radiance transfer functions. Our central idea is to use
specially parameterized spot lights, called caustic spot lights
(CSLs), as the intermediate representation of a twophase
algorithm. CSLs are flexible enough that a small number can
approximate the light leaving a caustic object, yet simple enough
that they can be efficiently evaluated by a pixel shader program
during accelerated rendering.We extend our approach to support
changing lighting direction by further dividing the pre-rendering
phase into per-scene and per-frame components: the per-frame
phase computes frame-specific CSLs by interpolating between CSLs
that were pre-computed with differing light directions.
