3 ms·
Extremely well written article. I loved the last section on avoiding antialiasing. I saw a talk about four years ago on using one ray from the light source to
by tgb 11y ago
Extremely well written article. I loved the last section on avoiding antialiasing.
I saw a talk about four years ago on using one ray from the light source to a point (through a complicated scene) to efficiently find lots of nearby paths. The idea was to use 'fireflies' to find other rays and so light the whole area accurately. This allowed them to efficiently render scenes where the light source was very indirect, light the light in another room lights your dark room through the open doorway but most of the light from the source never makes it anywhere close to our scene. It was all a clever application of the inverse function theorem, in a sense.
I'm reminded of it mostly because they had a wonderful demonstration in 2D where you could drag a light path through a scene of a bunch of dielectric lenses, etc and have it find a nearby path matching how you dragged it. Was very fun to see the paths so clearly.
- Tunabrain 11y agoAh, you're most likely talking about Wenzel Jakob's wonderful 2D tool for demonstrating Manifold Walks. Wenzel was actually one of my thesis advisors, and his tool was the inspiration behind this project. :) I was writing an implementation of Manifold Walks out of personal interest and reproduced his 2D tool for debugging purposes. Eventually I realized that caustics in 2D actually look kinda neat, so I spent some time doing research and then fleshed it out into this article + demo.