Special Topics in Computer Graphics: Global Illumination

A small graduate course in research topics in image synthesis, specifically global illumination. Description of course.

Topics, with Reading and Links to More Info

• Spatial Data Structures for Fast Ray Tracing
  • My Index to Ray Tracing News articles about spatial data structures and other topics.
  • "The Ray Tracing Kernel", David Kirk and James Arvo, Ausgraph '88.
• Reflectance Models
  • Reflectance model visualizer that we wrote as a group. It has code for Phong, Cook-Torrance, Oren-Nayar, He. C++ source code, SGI executable.
  • Cook and Torrance, SIGGRAPH '81. General model for directional diffuse reflection.
  • "A comprehensive physical model for light reflection", Xiao D. He, Kenneth E. Torrance, Francois X. Sillion and Donald P. Greenberg, SIGGRAPH 91. Also see their multimedia paper on the same topic, SIGGRAPH 92. More general model for directional diffuse reflection (but doesn't treat ideal diffuse, anisotropy, or transmission). Richard Knight's comments on the model.
  • "Measuring and Modeling Anisotropic Reflection", Greg Ward, SIGGRAPH 92. A more empirical and practical approach than He's: easier to compute. Handles anisotropy.
  • Michael Oren & Shree Nayar's papers on diffuse reflection. Generalization of Lambert's law for rough surfaces. See their SIGGRAPH 94 (8 pp.) and IJCV 95 (39 pp.) papers.
  • Greg Ward's RADIANCE renderer implements several reflectance models. Get the distribution and look at lib/He.cal, for instance.
  • Paul Diefenbach's PhD thesis discusses the normalization of Phong's illumination model (p.90)
  • BRDF info prepared by Ken Ellis.
• Distribution Ray Tracing and Monte Carlo Methods
  • Monte Carlo Graphics links collected by Peter Shirley
  • "Monte Carlo Methods in Rendering", Peter Shirley, SIGGRAPH '94 Course Notes, (revised version of "Monte Carlo Simulation and Integration", SIGGRAPH 93 Course Notes). Nice tutorial on MC methods for rendering and global illumination.
  • "Mathematical Models and Monte Carlo Algorithms for Physically Based Rendering", PhD thesis, 144 pages, Eric Lafortune. Contains general tutorial on Monte Carlo methods in global illumination.
  • "Non-Uniform Random Variate Generation", Luc Devroye, Springer-Verlag, 1986. The bible of generating random numbers with arbitrary distributions; not specific to computer graphics.
  • Excerpt of recent (11/96) debate about the merits of Monte Carlo techniques in global illumination, from globillum mailing list.
  • "A Ray Tracing Solution to Diffuse Interreflection", Greg Ward, Francis Rubinstein and Robert Clear, SIGGRAPH '88. General, efficient algorithm for diffuse interreflection, used in the RADIANCE renderer.
• Wavelets and Wavelet Radiosity
  • "Wavelets for Computer Graphics: A Primer". Eric J. Stollnitz, Tony D. DeRose, and David H. Salesin. TR 94-09-11, Dept. of CS&E, U. of Washington, Sept. 1994. Very good tutorial on wavelets, oriented toward image and surface approximation, but not focused on radiosity. This later evolved into their 1996 Morgan Kaufmann book. .
  • Other wavelet links.
  • "Wavelet Radiosity", Steven J. Gortler, Peter Schroeder, Michael Cohen, and Pat Hanrahan, SIGGRAPH '93. Concise description of wavelet radiosity algorithm; a dense paper.
  • "Wavelet Projections for Radiosity", Peter Schroeder, Steven J. Gortler, Michael Cohen, and Pat Hanrahan, Fourth Eurographics Workshop on Rendering, June 1993. More mathematical than the previous, focuses on flatland (2-D scenes).
  • "Rapid Hierarchical Radiosity Algorithm", Pat Hanrahan, David Salzman, Larry Aupperle, SIGGRAPH '91. Predecessor to wavelet radiosity algorithm; more algorithms & intuition; less math.
  • Wavelet Radiosity: Wavelet Methods for Integral Equations, Peter Schroeder, from Wavelets in Computer Graphics, SIGGRAPH '96 course. Schroeder's notes contain more discussion of how to implement wavelet radiosity.