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Abstract:
With the advancements in realtime ray tracing and new global illumination
algorithms we are now able to render the most important illumination effects at
interactive rates. One of the major remaining issues is the fast and efficient
simulation of caustic illumination, such as e.g. the illumination from a car
headlight. The photon mapping algorithm is a simple and robust approach that
generates high-quality results and is the preferred algorithm for computing
caustic illumination. However, photon mapping has a number of properties that
make it rather slow on today s processors. Photon mapping has also been
notoriously difficult to parallelize efficiently.
In this paper, we present a detailed analysis of the performance issues of
photon mapping together with signifi- cant performance improvements for all
aspects of the photon mapping technique. The solution forms a complete
framework for realtime photon mapping that efficiently combines realtime ray
tracing, optimized and improved photon mapping algorithms, and efficient
parallelization across commodity PCs. The presented system achieves realtime
photon mapping performance of up to 22 frames per second on non-trivial scenes,
while still allowing for interactively updating all aspects of the scene,
including lighting, material properties, and geometry.
