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How to write a polarisation ray tracer

Published: 12 December 2011 Publication History

Abstract

Polarisation Ray Tracing is a bit like spectral rendering. You might have heard about it, but the technical details - what exactly it is all about, how it is best done, what the benefits are, where you ought to use it, and where you can safely omit it - are not that well known. At least in principle, information about all this is available already - but it is scattered across many different sources, some of which are outside graphics literature, and consequently can be a bit hard to find at first. Also, a number of these resources - in particular publications in physics literature - were not written with graphics engineering in mind, and can prove hard to directly apply to the engineering problem of getting such a Tenderer to work. This course aims to provide a unified one-stop information resource on this topic, and should enable graphics engineers with a background in physically-based rendering to properly assess whether the phenomenon has to be included in a given simulation, and what has to be done in order to properly allow for handling of the phenomenon in a ray-based Tenderer. However, the contents of the course are also potentially very relevant for other areas of graphics beyond rendering proper: polarised light is currently being used in several other contexts, such as face scanning, highlight removal, or 3D projection technologies. Engineers and researchers in these other areas might benefit from the course insofar as the knowledge needed for an outright simulation of polarised light transport presented here is a superset of the information needed for more specialised tasks. This comprehensive overview would thus be a useful repository of knowledge for other areas as well.

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Cited By

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  • (2014)Discrete ordinate method for polarized light transport solution and subsurface BRDF computationComputers and Graphics10.1016/j.cag.2014.09.00245:C(17-27)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2014

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            cover image ACM Conferences
            SA '11: SIGGRAPH Asia 2011 Courses
            December 2011
            2474 pages
            ISBN:9781450311359
            DOI:10.1145/2077434
            • Conference Chair:
            • Pedro Sander
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            Published: 12 December 2011

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            December 12 - 15, 2011
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            • (2014)Discrete ordinate method for polarized light transport solution and subsurface BRDF computationComputers and Graphics10.1016/j.cag.2014.09.00245:C(17-27)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2014

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