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Nov 2:

• Initial version of the 2023/2024 website.

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BLOCK 2 Schedule

LECTURE SLIDES and RECORDINGS

Links to lecture slides will be made available during the block.

• Lecture 1: Introduction
• Lecture 2: Whitted
  
• Lecture 3: Light Transport
  
• Lecture 4: Acceleration Structures
• Lecture 5: Path Tracing
• Lecture 6: The Perfect BVH
• Lecture 7: Variance Reduction (1)
  
• Lecture 8: GPGPU Ray Tracing (1)
  
• Lecture 9: Variance Reduction (2)
  
• Lecture 10: GPGPU Ray Tracing (2)  (updated TL;DR version)
  
• Lecture 11: "Various"
• Lecture 12: Bidirectional
  
• Lecture 13: Probability Theory
• Lecture 14: TAA, ReSTIR et al.
• Lecture 15: Recap
• Lecture 16: Learning GI, Exam Prep

Please find recordings for the course in Teams.

SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL

FILES

• C/C++ coding template: on Github.

RENDERERS

The course includes a software project that should be worked on in pairs. It is allowed to work on this alone, but be aware that the scope of the project is tuned for duos.

There are two milestones for this project:

1. Interactivity: based on the theory, you will transform a basic ray tracer into an interactive renderer. The renderer is extended with basic animation support.
   
2. For the final version of your project, you will be adding global illumination to the renderer. The default approach for this is a path tracer; however other options exist as well. You are free to chose your specific focus in this phase of the project, e.g. GPU rendering or advanced variance reduction.
   

The final grade for the software project is calculated as follows:

practical grade = (P1 + 2 * P2) / 3

GRADING

In order to pass the course, you must meet these requirements:

Practical grade P = (P1 + 2 * P2) / 3
Exam grade E
Final grade F = (2 * P + E) / 3

Where

P >= 4.5
E >= 4.5
F >= 5.5.

RETAKES AND REQUIREMENTS

There will be an opportunity for a retake exam or a retake assignment. In order to qualify, a grade of at least 4.0 is required in both areas (final exam, practicals). The retake exam or assignment replaces the matching exam or assignment.

IMPORTANT: you can only take the retake exam if you have both a high-enough but non-passing grade (i.e., at least 4.0 and less than 5.5).

Transfers from the previous lecture

If you are retaking this course it may be possible to transfer partial grades to this academic year. This is only possible for practical assignment grades; if you are retaking Advanced Graphics, you must retake the exam. Contact me for details.

LITERATURE

• T. Whitted. An Improved Illumination Model for Shaded Display. Commun. ACM, 23(6):343–349, 1980.
• Interactive Rendering with Coherent Ray Tracing, Wald et al., 2001.
• Large Ray Packets for Real-time Whitted Ray Tracing, Overbeck et al., 2008.
• Fast Agglomerative Clustering for Rendering, Walter et al., 2008.
• Heuristics for Ray Tracing using Space Subdivision, MacDonald & Booth, 1990.
• Distributed Ray Tracing, Cook et al., 1984.
• The Rendering Equation, Kajiya, 1986.
• Importance Sampling for Production Rendering, pages 5-38.
• Ray tracing on programmable graphics hardware. Purcell et al., 2002.
• Interactive k-d tree GPU raytracing. Horn et al., 2007.
• Understanding the Efficiency of Ray Tracing on GPUs. Aila & Laine, 2009.
• Getting Rid of Packets - Efficient SIMD Single-Ray Traversal using Multi-branching BVHs. Wald et al., 2008.
• Megakernels Considered Harmfull: Wavefront Path Tracing on GPUs. Laine et al., 2013.
• Theory for Off-Specular Reflection from Roughened Surfaces. Torrance & Sparrow, 1967.

Recommended literature

PAPERS & ONLINE MATERIALS

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