Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Photon Soup Update

Posted by timothy on from the happy-4th dept.

rkeene517 writes "Two and a half months ago I posted an article asking for spare computer cycles. I was swamped by emails and volunteers. After the first weeks most dropped out. The die-hards kept running the program and we simulated 45.3 billion photons. The pictures are here. Thanks to all that helped out. I will be submitting the images to SIGGRAPH 2005 and a paper. (P.S. Never post your email address on slashdot. I got 900 emails! ouch.)"

3 of 116 comments (clear)

  1. Mirror by uss_valiant · · Score: 5, Informative

    Such a story is useless without the images. So here's a temporary mirror for the resulting images of the project:

    Photon Rendering Project: image mirror

    The mirror won't be up forever.

  2. Re:I missed this I guess... by TheGavster · · Score: 5, Informative

    Photons mapping is currently used on a small scale in some rendering engines to more accurately simulate light bounces. Its particularly useful at calculating caustics (light getting focused through a transparent medium) which can't be done by the less intensive radiosity systems. This experiment, however, seems to try to render using photon mapping exclusively. Nice idea, though not really practical at the present state of computing, given the graininess of the images and the amount of processing time. The Brazil rendering system (http://www.splutterfish.com/sf/sf_gen_page.php3?p rinter=1&page=brazil) for example, uses photon mapping on a much small scale (usually between 1-10M photons) in combination with raytracing to provide clear, realistic imagery (though not as technically perfect as this example)

    --
    "Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
  3. BitTorrent download by JackZ · · Score: 4, Informative

    Have a link to a BitTorrent tracker with the images.
    You will want 'photon_soup'

    Jack