Interactive Volume Caustics in Single-Scattering Media
Volume caustics are intricate illumination patterns formed by light
first interacting with a specular surface and subsequently being scattered inside a participating medium. Although this phenomenon
can be simulated by existing techniques, image synthesis is usually
non-trivial and time-consuming.
Motivated by interactive applications, we propose a novel volume
caustics rendering method for single-scattering participating media.
Our method is based on the observation that line rendering of illumination rays into the screen buffer establishes a direct light path
between the viewer and the light source. This connection is introduced via a single scattering event for every pixel affected by the
line primitive. Since the GPU is a parallel processor, the radiance
contributions of these light paths to each of the pixels can be computed and accumulated independently. The implementation of our
method is straightforward and we show that it can be seamlessly
integrated with existing methods for rendering participating media.
We achieve high-quality results at real-time frame rates for large
and dynamic scenes containing homogeneous participating media.
For inhomogeneous media, our method achieves interactive performance that is close to real-time. Our method is based on a simplified physical model and can thus be used for generating physically
plausible previews of expensive lighting simulations quickly.
Projects

State of the Art in Computational Fabrication and Display of Material Appearance.
Eurographics STAR 2013
Abstract
After decades of research on digital representations of
material and object appearance, computer graphics has more
recently turned to the problem of creating physical
artifacts with controllable appearance characteristics.
While this work has mostly progressed in two parallel
streams – display technologies as well as novel fabrication
processes – we believe there is a large overlap and the
potential for synergies between these two approaches. In
this report, we summarize research efforts from the worlds
of fabrication display, and categorize the different
approaches into a common taxonomy. We believe that this
report can serve as a basis for systematic exploration of
the design space in future research.
Bibtex
@inproceedings{Hullin13:STAR,
author = {Matthias B. Hullin and Ivo Ihrke and Wolfgang Heidrich and Tim Weyrich and Gerwin Damberg and Martin Fuchs},
title = {State of the Art in Computational Fabrication and Display of Material Appearance},
booktitle = {STAR Proceedings of Eurographics},
year = 2013,
pages = {xx--yy},
}
author = {Matthias B. Hullin and Ivo Ihrke and Wolfgang Heidrich and Tim Weyrich and Gerwin Damberg and Martin Fuchs},
title = {State of the Art in Computational Fabrication and Display of Material Appearance},
booktitle = {STAR Proceedings of Eurographics},
year = 2013,
pages = {xx--yy},
}