Path Integration for Light Transport in Volumes
Eurographics Symposium on Rendering 2003, June 2003, Leuven, Belgium
Authors
Abstract
Simulating the transport of light in volumes such as clouds or
objects with subsurface scattering is computationally expensive.
We describe an approximation to such transport using path
integration. Path integral formulations of physical processes have been
used in physics to solve a wide variety of problems including energy
propagation in random media and transfer equation. We harness the idea
of light transport expressed as a sum over all possible paths and
adapt it for rendering applications. Unlike the more commonly used
diffusion approximation, the path integration approach does not rely on
the assumption that the material within the volume is dense.
Instead, it assumes the phase function of the volume material
is strongly forward scattering, an assumption that is often the
case in nature. We show that this approach is useful for
simulating subsurface scattering and scattering in clouds.
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