Advanced graphics

Course goals

Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs): After completing this course, students will...

1. Understand the physical basis of light transport simulation.
2. Have knowledge of the main ray tracing-based rendering methods.
3. Have knowledge of acceleration structures for ray-scene intersection and how to construct an efficient BVH for static and dynamic scenes.
4. Have knowledge of the characteristics of GPUs related to ray tracing and be aware of algorithms that specifically target these processors.
5. Understand Monte Carlo and variance reduction techniques, specifically the application of probability density functions in the context of light transport.
6. Have knowledge of state-of-the-art developments in the field of physically based rendering.

Assessment
In order to pass the course, you must participate in all assessments to receive a grade:

• Practical assignment 1 (ILOs 2 and 3) - grade: P1
• Practical assignment 2 (ILOs 2 and 3, and others depending on your specific project choice) - grade: P2
• Exam (ILOs 1-6) - grade: E
• Weighted average practical grade: P = (P1 + 2*P2) / 3
• Final grade: F = (P + E) / 2

In order to pass the course, you must also meet these additional requirements:

• P >= 4.5
• E >= 5.5
• F >= 5.5

Content

The course starts with a recap of Whitted-style ray tracing.
We then explore various acceleration structures that help to run the ray tracing algorithm in real-time on commodity hardware. We will see that a well-built bounding volume hierarchy provides both flexibility and speed, for static and dynamic scenes.

The second part of the course introduces the path tracing algorithm, and related light transport theory.
We investigate various methods to improve the efficiency of the algorithm using probability theory. We will see that efficient path tracing can yield interactive frame rates.

In the third part of the course we cover ray tracing and path tracing on the GPU.
We will explore recent research in high performance stochastic rendering.