Fast real-time caustics from height fields

  • Authors:
  • Cem Yuksel;John Keyser

  • Affiliations:
  • Texas A&M University, College Station, USA;Texas A&M University, College Station, USA

  • Venue:
  • The Visual Computer: International Journal of Computer Graphics
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Caustics are crucial in water rendering, yet they are often neglected in real-time applications due to the demanding computational requirements of the general-purpose caustics computation methods. In this paper we present a two-pass algorithm for caustics computation that is extremely fast and produces high-quality results. Our algorithm is targeted for commonly used height field representations of water and a planar caustic-receiving surface. The underlying theory of our approach is presented along with implementation details and pseudo codes.