UCSD computer scientists have developed a fog and smoke
machine for highly realistic computer graphics that cuts the computing cost of
creating 3-D images from scratch. Their findings will be showcased today at
premier computer graphics conference, Eurographics 2008, in
This new advancement achieves greater realism through the
use of “ray-tracing algorithms,” which have recently become the basis of a
major shift in the computer graphics, film, animation and video-game
industries. These algorithms calculate how light in computer-generated images
would behave in the real world, based on the laws of nature.
Specifically, UCSD’s recent work uses “photon mapping,” a
subset of the ray-tracing algorithms that collects all lighting information in
computer-generated scenes at once and minimizes the amount of unwanted visual
noise that previously obscured images.
“We took an algorithm that is already great and made it more
efficient,” said Wojciech Jarosz, the first author on the new Eurographics
paper and a doctoral candidate from the department of computer science and
engineering at UCSD’s Jacobs School of Engineering.
The new method is an improvement upon the Academy
Award-winning photon-mapping technique that UCSD computer science professor Henrik
Wann Jensen developed during his doctoral studies. Jensen and fellow UCSD
computer science professor Matthias Zwicker coauthored the paper that will be
showcased at the Eurographics conference.
