This is an advanced course on photo realistic image synthesis. The course will cover the theory of global illumination computations and will give an introduction to Monte Carlo and Quasi-Monte Carlo methods as one way of solving the rendering equation. In addition, we will discuss surface appearance models, and their representation based on spherical harmonics or wavelets, leading to other photo realistic rendering techniques such as precomputed radiance transfer methods.The goal is to achieve real-time global illumination.
The topics covered in this course are:
- Monte Carlo Integration and Simulation
- Quasi-Monte Carlo Methods
- Path Tracing and Bidirectional Path Tracing
- Metropolis Sampling
- Photon Mapping
- Hierarchical Radiosity
- Appearance Modeling
- Spherical Harmonics and Wavelets
- Precomputed Radiance Transfer (PRT)
