Title: Photon Mapping Author: Nathan Cournia Description: Overview of photon mapping. Institution: Clemson University Class: CPSC805 - Advanced Computer Graphics Language: C++ Construction Time: About 1 Week Date Completed: April 18, 2002 Photon mapping is a global illumination technique developed by Henrik Wann Jensen. After reading a slew of papers I was eventually able to add a photon caustic map into my ray tracer. Here's an example of an image that my ray tracer can now produce (notice the caustic): Here are some slides (PDF) that give a general overview on what photon mapping is. Compiling: Most of the variables for photon mapping are hard code (sorry, I was lazy). As such, you'll have to modify the code on a per scene basis (changing the photon gathering radius and gather amount). However, compiling the code should be straight forward. Just type: make For command line options type: ./yart Example invocation: ./yart -i caustic.pov -w 320 -h 240 Source Code: cournia_yart-20020418.tar.gz (56k)