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Visibility-driven progressive volume photon tracing

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Abstract

In this paper, we present a novel approach to progressive photon-based volume rendering techniques. By making use of two Kd-trees (built in a preprocessing step) to store view beams (primary rays intersecting the medium) and visible points, our method allows to handle scenes with specular and refractive objects as well as homogeneous and heterogeneous participating media and does not require the storage of photon maps, which solves the memory management issue. These data structures are used to drive the photon shooting process by considering the photon visibility as an importance function (similarly to Hachisuka and Jensen in ACM Trans. Graph. 30(5):114:1–114:11, 2011) for scenes containing participating media. Finally, we demonstrate that our method can be easily combined with the most recent particle tracing approaches such as the one presented in Jarosz et al. (ACM Trans. Graph., vol. 30(6), 2011).

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Acknowledgements

Charly Collin has been supported in part by NSF grant IIS-1064427. Thanks go to the reviewers for their valuable reviews.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Central Florida, Orlando, USA

    Charly Collin & Sumanta Pattanaik

  2. IRISA, Université de Rennes 1, Rennes, France

    Mickaël Ribardière, Adrien Gruson, Rémi Cozot & Kadi Bouatouch

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  1. Charly Collin
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  2. Mickaël Ribardière
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  3. Adrien Gruson
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  4. Rémi Cozot
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  5. Sumanta Pattanaik
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  6. Kadi Bouatouch
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Correspondence to Mickaël Ribardière.

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Collin, C., Ribardière, M., Gruson, A. et al. Visibility-driven progressive volume photon tracing. Vis Comput 29, 849–859 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00371-013-0845-x

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