“GPU-based light wavefront simulation for real-time refractive object rendering” by Ziegler, Theobalt, Ihrke, Magnor, Tevs, et al. …

In our paper on Eikonal Rendering [1], presented in the SIGGRAPH 2007 main paper program, we propose a novel algorithm to render a variety of sophisticated lighting effects in and around refractive objects in real-time on a single PC. Our method enables us to realistically display objects with spatially-varying refractive indices, inhomogeneous attenuation characteristics, as well as well as spatially-varying reflectance and anisotropic scattering properties. We can reproduce arbitrarily curved light paths, volume and surface caustics, anisotropic scattering as well as total reflection by means of the same efficient theoretical framework. In our approach, scenes are represented volumetrically. One core component of our method is a fast GPU particle tracer to compute viewing ray trajectories. It uses ordinary differential equations derived from the eikonal equation. The second important component is a light simulator, which utilizes a similar ODE-based framework to adaptively trace light wavefronts through the scene in a few seconds. While the conference paper [1] focuses on the development of the theory and the validation of our results, this sketch describes in detail the new concepts and data structures that we developed to implement view rendering and light wavefront tracing on the GPU (see figure 1 for a stage overview).

1. I. Ihrke, G. Ziegler, A. Tevs, C. Theobalt, M. Magnor and H-P. Seidel: Eikonal Rendering: Efficient Light Transport in Refractive Objects. Proc. ACM SIGGRAPH 2007 (to be published).
2. G. Ziegler, A. Tevs, C. Theobalt and H-P. Seidel. GPU Point List Generation through Histogram Pyramids. Technical Reports of the MPI for Informatics, June 2006, MPI-I-2006-4-002.