Computer Science Department Seminar: Interactive Rendering of Realistic Lighting Models
Rui Wang
University of Virginia
Department of Computer Science
Faculty Host: Erik Learned-Miller
"Interactive Rendering of Realistic Lighting Models"
Realistic image synthesis at interactive rates continues to present a major challenge in computer graphics. Achieving photorealism requires a rendering system to employ physically based lighting models with complex illumination sources and natural material properties. Previous techniques such as Monte Carlo ray tracing or photon mapping can accurately simulate very sophisticated lighting models, but are too expensive to compute for real-time applications such as video games and visual simulation.
In this talk, I will describe a precomputation technique I have developed for accurate rendering of realistic lighting models that enables interactive manipulation of both the lighting and the viewpoint. My approach is based on wavelet approximation of precomputed light transport data about a static scene, and can simultaneously capture illumination complexity at several levels, including intricate shadows, glossy surface reflectance, indirect illumination, and translucency. I will show how this technique allows for efficient precomputation and rendering by using matrix factorization, transport accumulation, and wavelet approximation methods. Finally, the talk will conclude with some of my recent work on efficiently rotating wavelet functions to enable changing of surface reflectance properties dynamically.
Rui Wang is a Ph.D. candidate in the Computer Science department at the University of Virginia, where he is advised by David Luebke. His research lies in the field of computer graphics and he is particularly interested in global illumination algorithms, real-time rendering, 3D scanning and reconstruction, graphics hardware, and image processing. He received his Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Zhejiang University, China in 2001, and received his Master’s degree from the University of Virginia in 2003.
