Global Illumination using Photon Maps

This paper presents a two pass global illumination method based on the concept of photon maps. It represents a significant improvement of a previously described approach both with respect to speed, accuracy and versatility. In the first pass two photon maps are created by emitting packets of energy (photons) from the light sources and storing these as they hit surfaces within the scene. We use one high resolution caustics photon map to render caustics that are visualized directly and one low resolution photon map that is used during the rendering step. The scene is rendered using a distribution ray tracing algorithm optimized by using the information in the photon maps. Shadow photons are used to render shadows more efficiently and the directional information in the photon map is used to generate optimized sampling directions and to limit the recursion in the distribution ray tracer by providing an estimate of the radiance on all surfaces with the exception of specular and highly glossy surfaces.The results presented demonstrate global illumination in scenes containing procedural objects and surfaces with diffuse and glossy reflection models. The implementation is also compared with the Radiance program.