Caustic spot light for rendering caustics

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 durin...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: VC
• Authors: Xinguo Liu, Zhao Dong, Hujun Bao, Qunsheng Peng
• Keywords: Caustic Object, Caustic Patterns, Rigid Caustic Objects, VC 2008