Parallelization of render engine for global illumination of graphics scenes

Photorealistic image synthesis plays a central role in computer graphics since it has wide range of application areas such as scientific visualization, film industry, gaming and architectural modeling. Global illumination algorithms used for photorealistic image synthesis such as ray-tracing, radiosity, and photon mapping suffer from speed because of complex computational operations and hardware limitations. In this study, a parallelization technique for the photon mapping algorithm has been developed to reduce the rendering time of the images by distributing the jobs over computing units. To increase the visual quality of the output images, a multilevel dynamic anti-aliasing algorithm has also been implemented to smooth the jagged edges caused by the bucket render. Our render engine supports various geometry and material properties as well as hard-to-simulate visual effects such as caustics. System is tested on several three dimensional scene files to measure and analyze its performance.