Summer 2001 Research Work
Goal:
Caustics and
other global illumination
effects at an
interactive rate.

So currently, my research is aimed at getting realtime global illumination effects, such as caustics. I've got some so-so results from Spring 2001, Summer 2000, and Fall 2000. Currently, I am working on getting realtime caustics in either OpenGL programs or raytracers. I have ideas for both types of renderers, and some of my results are shown below.

Note that updates will be slow since I'm taking a hiatus for part of this summer.

Update Monday, June 18: Here are my images showing a basic OpenGL "hack" implementation of what I'm calling "Reflection Volumes". These are very similar to Diefenbach's Light Volumes, but I think they can be done more exact and faster than Diefenbach did them -- at least for simple objects.

Below, the black triangle on the wall is the "mirror". I skipped implementing the scene reflection in the mirror, as I just wanted a quick and dirty view of how the volume worked. They yellow sphere is the light source. In the following sequence, I first move the lightsource towards the eye point (so it disappears behind the camera), then I move the light left so the light hits the mirror at a grazing angle.

As the light starts hitting the mirror at grazing angles, the reflection volume quads become "less" planar (since the variation in incident angle for the three vertices becomes more extreme). Since OpenGL doesn't handle non-planar polygons well, the triangles used to create the stencil for the highlight don't approximate the correct highlight area very well. This is what causes the strange highlight shape.

Last Modified: June 18, 2001

Chris Wyman (wyman@cs.utah.edu)