Distributed ray tracing, also called distribution ray tracing and stochastic ray tracing, is a refinement of ray tracing that allows for the rendering of "soft" phenomena.
Conventional ray tracing uses single rays to sample many different domains. For example, when the color of an object is calculated, ray tracing might send a single ray to each light source in the scene. This leads to sharp shadows, since there is no way for a light source to be partially occluded (another way of saying this is that all lights are point sources and have zero area). Conventional ray tracing also typically spawns one reflection ray and one transmission ray per intersection. As a result, reflected and transmitted images are perfectly (and usually unrealistically) sharp.
Distributed ray tracing removes these restrictions by averaging multiple rays distributed over an interval. For example, soft shadows can be rendered by distributing shadow rays over the light source area. Glossy or blurry reflections and transmissions can be rendered by distributing reflection and transmission rays over a solid angle about the mirror reflection or transmission direction. Adding "soft" phenomena to ray-traced images in this way can improve realism immensely, since the sharp phenomena rendered by conventional ray tracing are almost never seen in reality.
More advanced effects are also possible using the same framework. For instance, depth of field can be achieved by distributing ray origins over the lens area. In an animated scene, motion blur can be simulated by distributing rays in time. Distributing rays in the spectrum allows for the rendering of dispersion effects, such as rainbows and prisms.
Mathematically, in order to evaluate the rendering equation, one must evaluate several integrals. Conventional ray tracing estimates these integrals by sampling the value of the integrand at a single point in the domain, which is a very bad approximation, except for narrow domains. Distributed ray tracing samples the integrand at many randomly chosen points and averages the results to obtain a better approximation.
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.
Introduction to geometrical and wave optics for understanding the principles of optical microscopes, their advantages and limitations. Describing the basic microscopy components and the commonly used
The students study and apply fundamental concepts and algorithms of computer graphics for rendering, geometry
synthesis, and animation. They design and implement their own interactive graphics program
Path tracing is a computer graphics Monte Carlo method of rendering images of three-dimensional scenes such that the global illumination is faithful to reality. Fundamentally, the algorithm is integrating over all the illuminance arriving to a single point on the surface of an object. This illuminance is then reduced by a surface reflectance function (BRDF) to determine how much of it will go towards the viewpoint camera. This integration procedure is repeated for every pixel in the output image.
3D computer graphics, sometimes called CGI, 3D-CGI or three-dimensional , are graphics that use a three-dimensional representation of geometric data (often Cartesian) that is stored in the computer for the purposes of performing calculations and rendering , usually s but sometimes s. The resulting images may be stored for viewing later (possibly as an animation) or displayed in real time. 3D computer graphics, contrary to what the name suggests, are most often displayed on two-dimensional displays.
Global illumination (GI), or indirect illumination, is a group of algorithms used in 3D computer graphics that are meant to add more realistic lighting to 3D scenes. Such algorithms take into account not only the light that comes directly from a light source (direct illumination), but also subsequent cases in which light rays from the same source are reflected by other surfaces in the scene, whether reflective or not (indirect illumination).
To overcome the multipath interference in locating transient electromagnetic (EM) radiation sources in an indoor environment, we propose a criterion that calculates the correlation between back-propagated signals from observation points, to be used in EM t ...
This semester project report describes a prototype tracing tool that records the behavior of a Java program during its execution. It explains the two methods that were attempted to implement the tool, one using the Java debug interface, which gave poor res ...
Electron-Cyclotron waves are routinely used in tokamaks to heat the plasma and to drive current through the electron channel. Their unique ability to drive very localized current renders them the main foreseen tool for neoclassical tearing mode mitigation ...