Publications

Real-time Rendering of Indirectly Visible Caustics

GRAPP, February 2022

Abstract

Caustics are a challenging light transport phenomenon to render in real-time, and most previous approaches have used screen-space accumulation based on the fast rasterization hardware of GPUs. This limits the position of photon collection points to first hit screen space locations, and leads to missing caustics that should be visible in a mirror's reflection. In this paper we propose an algorithm that can render caustics visible via specular bounces in real-time. The algorithm takes advantage of hardware-accelerated ray tracing support found in modern GPUs. By constructing an acceleration structure around multiple bounce view ray hit points in world space, and tracing multiple bounce light rays through the scene, we ensure caustics can be created anywhere in the scene, not just in screen space. We analyze the performance and image quality of our approach, and show that we can produce indirectly visible caustics at real-time rates.

News

2022-02-16: Update BibTeX entry with DOI, add author copy of the paper and the presentation slides.
2022-01-20: Add BibTeX entry.
2021-12-03: Add link to GitHub repository.
2021-11-29: Initial upload.

Downloads

Paper

BibTeX entry

@inproceedings{ Moreau2022,
  author        = {Moreau, Pierre and Doggett, Michael},
  title         = {Real-time Rendering of Indirectly Visible Caustics},
  pages         = {39–48},
  DOI           = {10.5220/0010777800003124},

  editor        = {Sousa, A. Augusto and Debattista, Kurt and Bouatouch, Kadi},
  publisher     = {{SciTePress}},
  address       = {Setúbal, {PRT}},
  organization  = {{INSTICC}},
  booktitle     = {Proceedings of the 17th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications},
  series        = {{GRAPP}},
  volume        = {1},
  year          = {2022},
  ISSN          = {2184-4321},
  ISBN          = {978-989-758-555-5},

  eventdate     = {2022-02-06–2022-02-08}
}

Slides

Presentation at GRAPP 2022

Code

https://github.com/LUGGPublic/Indirectly-Visible-Caustics

Videos

Videos

All videos were captured in real-time on a GeForce RTX 3080 GPU (with 10 GB of VRAM).

Animated camera, rendered with 1024² light paths of up to 6 segments.

Animated glass sphere, rendered with 1024² light paths of up to 6 segments.

Animated mesh light, rendered with 1024² light paths of up to 6 segments.

Animated camera, glass sphere, and mesh light, rendered with 1024² light paths of up to 6 segments.

Last update: Thursday, 10-Sep-2009 13:23:22 CEST
Page Manager: Mike Doggett
Publisher: Department of Computer Science

Department of Computer Science