Eric J. Stollnitz

Interactive relighting of dynamic refractive objects

We present a new technique for interactive relighting of dynamic refractive objects with complex material properties. We describe our technique in terms of a rendering pipeline in which each stage runs entirely on the GPU. The rendering pipeline converts surfaces to volumetric data, traces the curved paths of photons as they refract through the volume, and renders arbitrary views of the resulting radiance distribution. Our rendering pipeline is fast enough to permit interactive updates to lighting, materials, geometry, and viewing parameters without any precomputation. Applications of our technique include the visualization of caustics, absorption, and scattering while running physical simulations or while manipulating surfaces in real time.