Thesis (M.S.) -- Worcester Polytechnic Institute. / Keywords: mobile devices; photon mapping; global illumination; ray tracing; energy; mobile; computer graphics. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 66-68).

A Monte Carlo light transport simulation is used in scattering-aware color 3D printing pipeline (Elek et al. [2017], Sumin et al. [2019]) to drive an iterative optimization loop. Its purpose is to find a material arrangement that yields the closest match in terms of surface appearance towards a target. As the light transport prediction takes up about 90% of the time it poses a significant bottleneck towards a practical application of this technology. The dense volumetric textures also require a lot of memory. Explicitly simulating every light interaction is particularly challenging in the setting of 3D printouts due to the heterogeneity, high density and high albedo of the media. In this thesis, we explore existing volumetric rendering techniques (Křivánek et al. [2014], Herholz et al. [2019]) and finally engineer a customized estimator for our setting, improving the performance considerably. Additionally, we investigate various storage solutions for the volumetric data and successfully reduce the memory footprint. All the algorithms are available in the form of Mitsuba renderer plugins.

Recently, methods were developed to render various global illumination effects with rasterization GPUs. Among those were hardware based ray tracing and photon mapping. However, due to current GPU??s inherent architectural limitations, the efficiency and throughput of these methods remained low. In this thesis, we propose a coherent rendering system that addresses these issues. First, we introduce new photon mapping and ray racing acceleration algorithms that facilitate data coherence and spatial locality, as well as eliminating unnecessary random memory accesses. A high level abstraction of the combined ray tracing and photon mapping streaming pipeline is introduced. Based on this abstraction, an efficient ray tracing and photon mapping GPU is designed. Using an event driven simulator, developed for this GPU, we verify and validate the proposed algorithms and architecture. Simulation results have validated better interactive performances compared to the current GPUs.

Recently, methods were developed to render various global illumination effects with rasterization GPUs. Among those were hardware based ray tracing and photon mapping. However, due to current GPU??s inherent architectural limitations, the efficiency and throughput of these methods remained low. In this thesis, we propose a coherent rendering system that addresses these issues. First, we introduce new photon mapping and ray racing acceleration algorithms that facilitate data coherence and spatial locality, as well as eliminating unnecessary random memory accesses. A high level abstraction of the combined ray tracing and photon mapping streaming pipeline is introduced. Based on this abstraction, an efficient ray tracing and photon mapping GPU is designed. Using an event driven simulator, developed for this GPU, we verify and validate the proposed algorithms and architecture. Simulation results have validated better interactive performances compared to the current GPUs.

This master thesis focuses on photon mapping rendering technique. A simple photon mapping was implemented as a baseline and then progressive photon mapping was prepared for CPU and GPU. After implementing progressive photon mapping on GPU, further acceleration techniques were proposed. Finally, in the thesis, genetic clustering algorithm for suitable clusters on GPU was proposed.

This work introduces a method for optimal combination of light paths generated from the camera and from the light sources in the Photon Mapping algorithm used for computing global illumination. Our method is based on Multiple Importance Sampling, a general approach, introduced by Veach, for adaptive path connection in Bidirectional Path-Tracing. Our goal is to examine this method in connection with the biased algorithm of Photon Mapping and to improve the ineffective heuristic used in the original version of this algorithm. This heuristic is usually problematic when applied to the scenes where highly glossy materials prevail.

L'un des objectifs lors du développement d'un produit industriel est d'obtenir un prototype numérique valide et réaliste. Cette thèse a pour objectif d'améliorer la qualité des simulations dans le contexte d'un processus de production. Ces processus impliquent souvent un rendu de type "walkthrough", avec une géométrie fixe mais un déplacement continu de l'observateur. Nous nous intéresserons donc plus précisément aux méthodes de rendu physiquement réaliste de scènes complexes pour un scénario "walkthrough". Durant le rendu, l'utilisateur doit pouvoir mesurer précisément la radiance d'un point ou d'une zone donnée, ainsi que modifier en temps réel la puissance des sources lumineuses. Fondée sur la méthode du photon mapping, nos travaux montrent les modifications à apporter aux algorithmes afin d'améliorer à la fois la qualité des images et le temps de calcul du processus de rendu. / One of the goals when developing the product is to immediately obtain a real and valid prototype. This thesis provide new rendering methods to increase the quality of the simulations during the upstream work of the production pipeline. The latter usually requires a walkthrough rendering. Thus, we focuses on the physically-based rendering methods of complex scenes in walkthrough. During the rendering, the end-users must be able to measure the illuminate rates and to interactively modify the power of the light source to test different lighting ambiances. Based on the original photon mapping method, our work shows how some modifications can decrease the calculation time and improve the quality of the resulting images according to this specific context.

Mobile devices such as cell phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and laptops continue to increase in memory and processor speed at a rapid pace. In recent years it has become common for users to check their email, browse the internet, or play music and movies while traveling. The performance gains are also making mobile graphics renderers more viable applications. However, the underlying battery technology that powers mobile devices has only tripled in capacity in the past 15 years whereas processor speeds have seen a 100-fold increase in the same period. Photon mapping, an extension of ray-tracing, is a robust global illumination algorithm used to produce photorealistic images. Photon mapping, like ray-tracing, can render high-quality specular highlights, transparent and reflective materials, and soft shadows. Complex effects such as caustics, participating media, and subsurface scattering can be rendered more efficiently using photon mapping. This work profiles the energy use of a photon-mapping based renderer to first establish what aspects require the most energy. Second, the effect several photon mapping settings have on image quality is measured. Reasonable tradeoffs between energy savings and moderately diminished image quality can then be recommended, making photon mapping more viable on mobile devices. Our results show that image quality is affected the least as settings corresponding to final gather computations are adjusted. This implies that a user can trade a modest decrease in image quality for significant gains in energy efficiency. Suggestions are made for using energy more efficiently when rendering caustics. Results also show that, although overall energy use is higher with larger image resolutions, per-pixel energy costs are cheaper.

This thesis presents a method for simulating fluids on a view dependent grid structure to exploit level-of-detail with distance to the viewer. Current computer graphics techniques, such as the Stable Fluid and Particle Level Set methods, are modified to support a nonuniform simulation grid. In addition, infinite fluid boundary conditions are introduced that allow fluid to flow freely into or out of the simulation domain to achieve the effect of large, boundary free bodies of fluid. Finally, a physically based rendering method known as photon mapping is used in conjunction with ray tracing to generate realistic images of water with caustics. These methods were implemented as a C++ application framework capable of simulating and rendering fluid in a variety of user-defined coordinate systems.

This thesis deals with the estimation of global illumination of a~scene. Global illumination is expressed as a~physical simulation in connection with illumination methods used in current computer graphics. In the practical part there is expressed an implementation of global illumination estimation using photon maps.