Global Illumination
Overview
The goal of global illumination is to generate realistic-looking images
of objects and scenes (that may or may not exist in reality), by simulating
the way light is transported. At equilibrium, the light at each point
potentially depends on the light from all other points. This can be
described by a multi-dimensional Fredholm integral equation of the second
kind, which we solve efficiently using importance, wavelets, and clustering.
This example shows the equilibrium distribution of light in an
imaginary room.
Click here
to see a larger version of this image.
This is an image of a glossy ``sphereflake'' exhibiting several kinds of
glossy and diffuse
reflectors, and several different kinds of interreflections between them.
Click here
to see a larger version of this image.
Personnel
Publications
- A Continuous Adjoint Formulation for Radiance Transport.
Per H. Christensen, David H. Salesin, and
Tony D. DeRose. In Proceedings of the Fourth
EuroGraphics Workshop on Rendering, pages 95-104, Paris,
France, June 1993.
- Wavelet Radiance. Per H. Christensen,
Eric J. Stollnitz, David H. Salesin, and
Tony D. DeRose. In G. Sakas, P. Shirley,
and S. Müller, editors, Photorealistic
Rendering Techniques, pages 295-309. Springer-Verlag,
Berlin, 1995. Presented at the Fifth Eurographics Workshop on
Rendering, Darmstadt, Germany, June 1994.
[Compressed PostScript file, 1.9Mb]
- Global Illumination of Glossy Environments Using Wavelets
and Importance. Per H. Christensen, Eric J. Stollnitz,
David H. Salesin, and Tony D. DeRose. ACM
Transactions on Graphics, 15(1):37-71, January 1996.
[Directory of compressed PostScript files]
- Clustering for Glossy Global
Illumination. Per H. Christensen, Dani Lischinski,
Eric J. Stollnitz, and David H. Salesin. ACM
Transactions on Graphics, January 1997 (to appear).
[Compressed PostScript file, 320K]
Thesis
<stoll@amath.washington.edu>