TU Wien Rendering #35 - Stochastic Progressive Photon Mapping
79Photon mapping is working great for a variety of scenes. Ideally, we would like to have a large number of photons for caustics, indirect illumination, etc. but having only a finite amount of photons in our photon maps introduces problems. To remedy this, Toshiya Hachisuka came up with Stochastic Progressive Photon Mapping, a technique where we progressively discard and re-generate the photon maps with fresh samples. This way we are not stuck with the only one photon map we have and we get more and more information about the scene as time goes by.
About the course:
This course aims to give an overview of basic and state-of-the-art methods of rendering. Offline methods such as ray and path tracing, photon mapping and many other algorithms are introduced and various refinement are explained.
The basics of the involved physics, such as geometric optics, surface and media interaction with light and camera models are outlined.
The apparatus of Monte Carlo methods is introduced which is heavily used in several algorithms and its refinement in the form of stratified sampling and the Metropolis-Hastings method is explained.
At the end of the course students should be familiar with common techniques in rendering and find their way around the current state-of-the-art of the field. Furthermore the exercises should deepen the attendees' understanding of the basic principles of light transport and enable them to write a simple rendering program themselves.
These videos are the recordings of the lectures of 2015 at the Teschnische Universität Wien by Károly Zsolnai and Thomas Auzinger
Course website and slides → http://www.cg.tuwien.ac.at/courses/Rendering/
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Web → https://cg.tuwien.ac.at/~zsolnai/
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