University of California at San Diego computer scientists have created a fog and smoke machine for computer graphics that cuts the computational cost of making realistic smoky and foggy 3-D images, such as beams of light from a lighthouse piercing thick fog. By cutting the computing cost for creating highly realistic imagery from scratch, the scientists are helping to pull cutting-edge graphics techniques out of research labs into movies and video games.
At the heart of the new UCSD advance is computationally slimmed photon mapping algorithms, which are a subset of the ray tracing algorithms. The computer scientists found a way to collect all of the pertinent lighting information in computer-generated scenes at once, which made the new photon mapping approach more lightweight than conventional photon mapping. This technique is particularly suited to create smoky, foggy or cloudy scenes and produce images that do not have much unwanted visual noise.
"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 Ph.D. candidate from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at UCSD's Jacobs School of Engineering. Up to now, computational constraints have limited the use of photon mapping and other ray tracing approaches in places where speed and lightweight computation are crucial, such as video games.
