FAST CAUSTICS EFFECTS USING OBJECT DEPENDENT PHOTON MAPS

In this paper, we present a method to speed up the classical caustics photon mapping. This is done by collecting gather samples on the refractive object in the scene in pre-computation phase, and then shooting photons only to these samples in the photon map construction phase. To simulate the effect of emitting multi-million photons all over the scene as in classical caustics maps, we tune the power of the emitted photons using numerical scaling. By tuning the number of gather samples and their density and strength, we provide an approximate solution to the foreshortening problem that may arise from target shooting of photons. We obtained approximate results to the classical caustics photon mapping in a fraction of the construction time of the classical map, which makes it feasible to be used in semi-interactive applications.