Global illumination using photon maps
Proceedings of the eurographics workshop on Rendering techniques '96
Ray tracing in non-constant media
Proceedings of the eurographics workshop on Rendering techniques '96
An improved illumination model for shaded display
Communications of the ACM
A user-programmable vertex engine
Proceedings of the 28th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques
Proceedings of the 29th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques
IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications
IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications
Beam tracing polygonal objects
SIGGRAPH '84 Proceedings of the 11th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques
An approximate image-space approach for interactive refraction
ACM SIGGRAPH 2005 Papers
Visual Simulation of Heat Shimmering and Mirage
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
Technical Section: Simulation of atmospheric phenomena
Computers and Graphics
Optimization techniques for curved path computing
The Visual Computer: International Journal of Computer Graphics
Solid texture synthesis from 2D exemplars
ACM SIGGRAPH 2007 papers
Eikonal rendering: efficient light transport in refractive objects
ACM SIGGRAPH 2007 papers
Interactive relighting of dynamic refractive objects
ACM SIGGRAPH 2008 papers
Real-time KD-tree construction on graphics hardware
ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2008 papers
Single scattering in refractive media with triangle mesh boundaries
ACM SIGGRAPH 2009 papers
Understanding the efficiency of ray traversal on GPUs
Proceedings of the Conference on High Performance Graphics 2009
Non-linear volume photon mapping
EGSR'05 Proceedings of the Sixteenth Eurographics conference on Rendering Techniques
I3D '11 Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games
The State of the Art in Interactive Global Illumination
Computer Graphics Forum
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Existing algorithms can efficiently render refractive objects of constant refractive index. For a medium with a continuously varying index of refraction, most algorithms use the ray equation of geometric optics to compute piecewise-linear approximations of the non-linear rays. By assuming a constant refractive index within each tracing step, these methods often need a large number of small steps to generate satisfactory images. In this paper, we present a new approach for tracing non-constant, refractive media based on the ray equations of gradientindex optics. We show that in a medium of constant index gradient, the ray equation has a closed-form solution, and the intersection point between a ray and the medium boundaries can be efficiently computed using the bisection method. For general non-constant media, we model the refractive index as a piecewise-linear function and render the refraction by tracing the tetrahedron-based representation of the media. Our algorithm can be easily combined with existing rendering algorithms such as photon mapping to generate complex refractive caustics at interactive frame rates. We also derive analytic ray formulations for tracing mirages – a special gradient-index optical phenomenon.