Simulation of Wave Effects Based on Ray Tracing

A novel wave model is presented in this paper for realistically rendering diffraction and interference effects in ray-based renderers. The model indirectly simulate multibounce interference effects by means of the Wigner distribution function, where the bidirectional reflectance distribution function is constructed to encapsulate the phase variations. The approach is extended to directly compute phase variations in outgoing rays to render diffraction effects using the diffraction grating equation. We also implement an acceleration algorithm based on the current graphic hardware to gain realtime performance of rendering. The proposed model can be easily loaded into any ray-based renderer, and be used for rendering wave effects from surfaces with size of the wavelength.