Tuesday, April 15, 2008 The light piercing the fog in the top
image is smooth, realistic and computationally light-weight.
Why? Because UC San Diego computer scientists have figured out a
way to take the super-realistic-but-computationally-taxing
"photon mapping" approach and put it on a computational diet.
The result? A more efficient way to get extremely life like
computer generated images, especially of scenes where light is
passing through fog, smoke, dust or other "participating media."
The bottom image was created using the conventional photon
mapping approach, but given the same computational "budget." You
can get the same high quality image using the conventional
approach, but it's going to take you a long time. Why? Because
you have to sample the light at many many many points along the
ray from the camera to the objects in the scene. If you don't do
tons of sampling, then you'll miss light that is hanging out
between the camera and the objects in the scene. And when you
start missing a bunch of ligh