Global Illumination

CSCI 711 (Spring 2025)

READING LIST

Papers are available electronically by following the links (DCE Authentication Required).

This list may be updated appropriately as the course progresses.

Week 1 -- Introduction / Image Synthesis Pipeline

Primary:

Joe Geigel and Nan C. Schaller, Using photography as a metaphor for teaching image synthesis, Computers and Graphics, 29 (2), pp 257-265.

Supplemental:

James F. Blinn. "Vectors and Geometry and Objects, Oh My!," IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 84-93, May/June 2005.

Week 2 -- Light, Color,

Primary:

Ian Ashdown, "Photometry and Radiometry: A Tour Guide for Computer Graphics Enthusiasts", Course Notes -- Course 1: Realistic Input for Realistic Images, 1995 ACM SIGGRAPH Annual Conference, August 6-11, Los Angeles, CA, Appendix A, pp. 183-194.

Supplemental:

Jeremy Selan. 2012. "Cinematic color: from your monitor to the big screen." In ACM SIGGRAPH 2012 Courses (SIGGRAPH '12). Article 9, 1–54.
Andrew S. Glasner, "How to Derive a Spectrum from an RGB Triplet", IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, Vol. 9, No. 4, July 1989, pp. 95-99.
Brian Smits, "An RGB to Spectrum Converter for Reflectances", Journal of Graphics Tools, Vol 4, No. 4, 1999, pp. 11-22.
Garrett M. Johnson and Mark D. Fairchild, "Full Spectral Color Calculations in Realistic Image Synthesis", IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, Vol. 19, No. 4, pp. 47-53 (1999).

Week 2 -- Ray Tracing Basics

Primary:

Turner Whitted, "An Improved Illumination Model for Shaded Display", Communications of the ACM, June 1980, pp. 343-349.

Supplemental:

Steven Parker, William Martin, Peter-Pike J. Sloan, Peter Shirley, Brian Smits, and Charles Hansen, "Interactive Ray Tracing", Proceedings of the 1999 Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics, pp. 119-126
Sven Woop, Jörg Schmittler, Philipp Slusallek, .RPU: a programmable ray processing unit for realtime ray tracing, ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG), Volume 24 , Issue 3 (July 2005), Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH 2005, pp 434 - 444.

Week 3 -- Spatial Data Structures

Primary:

Zhou, K., Hou, Q., Wang, R., and Guo, B. 2008. Real-time KD-tree construction on graphics hardware. In ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2008 Papers (Singapore, December 10 - 13, 2008). J. C. Hart, Ed. SIGGRAPH Asia '08. ACM, New York, NY, 1-11.

Supplemental:

Daniel Kopta, Thiago Ize, Josef Spjut, Erik Brunvand, Al Davis, and Andrew Kensler. 2012. Fast, effective BVH updates for animated scenes. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games (I3D '12), Stephen N. Spencer (Ed.). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 197-204.
Stich, M., Friedrich, H., and Dietrich, A. 2009. "Spatial splits in bounding volume hierarchies." In Proceedings of the Conference on High Performance Graphics 2009 (New Orleans, Louisiana, August 01 - 03, 2009). S. N. Spencer, D. McAllister, M. Pharr, and I. Wald, Eds. HPG '09. ACM, New York, NY, 7-13.
Zhefeng Wu, Fukai Zhao, and Xinguo Liu. 2011. SAH KD-tree construction on GPU. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on High Performance Graphics (HPG '11), Stephen N. Spencer (Ed.). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 71-78.

Week 3 -- K-D Tree Implementation

Papers referenced in lecture slides:
- Wald, I.; Havran, V., "On building fast kd-Trees for Ray Tracing, and on doing that in O(N log N)," Interactive Ray Tracing 2006, IEEE Symposium on , vol., no., pp.61,69, 18-20 Sept. 2006.
- Vlastimil Havran and Jiri Bittner, "On Improving KD-Trees for Ray Shooting", In Proc. of WSCG 2002 Conference, pp.209--217, 2002.
- Hunt, W.; Mark, W.R.; Stoll, G., "Fast kd-tree Construction with an Adaptive Error-Bounded Heuristic," Interactive Ray Tracing 2006, IEEE Symposium on , vol., no., pp.81,88, 18-20 Sept. 2006
- Tomas Akenine-Möller. 2005. Fast 3D triangle-box overlap testing. In ACM SIGGRAPH 2005 Courses (SIGGRAPH '05), John Fujii (Ed.). ACM, New York, NY, USA, , Article 8 .
- Vlastimil Havran, Tomás Kopal, Jiří Bittner, and Jiří Žára. 1998. Fast robust BSP tree traversal algorithm for ray tracing. J. Graph. Tools 2, 4 (January 1998), 15-23.

Week 4 -- Illumination Models / BRDFs

Primary:

Edward H. Adelson, "On Seeing Stuff: The Perception of Materials by Humans and Machines", Proceedings of the. SPIE Vol. 4299, pp. 1-12, Human Vision and Electronic Imaging VI, B. E. Rogowitz; T. N. Pappas; Eds. (2001)

Papers Mentioned in class:

Hoffman, N, et. al. "Physically-Based Shading Models in Film and Game Production" SIGGRAPH 2010 Course Notes.
Cobert, M., Premoze, S, and Francious, G., "Importance Sampling for Production Rendering", SIGGRAPH 2010 Course Notes.

Supplemental:

Colbert, M. ; Pattanaik, S. ; Krivanek, J. , "BRDF-Shop: creating physically correct bidirectional reflectance distribution functions", Computer Graphics and Applications, IEEE, Volume: 26 , Issue: 1: 2006 , pp 30-36.
Kim, S., Lee, J., and Nam, S. 2009. Realistic rendering system using the measured BRDFs. In Proceedings of the 2nd international Conference on interaction Sciences: information Technology, Culture and Human (Seoul, Korea, November 24 - 26, 2009). ICIS '09, vol. 403. ACM, New York, NY, 1116-1121

Kurt, M. and Edwards, D. 2009. A survey of BRDF models for computer graphics. SIGGRAPH Comput. Graph. 43, 2 (May. 2009), 1-7.
R.L. Cook and K. Torrance "A Reflectance Model for Computer Graphics",ACM Transactions on Graphics, pp. 7-24, 1982.

Paul Strauss, "A Realistic Lighting Model for Computer Graphics", IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, November 1990, pp. 56-64.
Bui Tuong Phong, "Illumination for Computer Generated Pictures", Communications of the ACM, Vol. 18, No. 6, June 1975, pp. 311-317
James Blinn, "Models of Light Reflection for Computer Synthesized Pictures", Computer Graphics, Volume 11, July 1977, pp. 192-198.
Matt Pharr and Pat Hanrahan, "Monte Carlo evaluation of non-linear scattering equations for subsurface reflection", Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2000, pp75-84.

Week 5 -- Advanced BRDFs

Primary:

Brent Burley, "Physically Based Shading at Disney", part of "Practical physically-based shading in film and game production". In ACM SIGGRAPH 2012 Courses (SIGGRAPH '12). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA,

Supplemental:

Montes, Rosana, et al. "An Importance Sampling Method for Arbitrary BRDFs." International Conference on Computer Vision and Computer Graphics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2008.
Jason Lawrence, Szymon Rusinkiewicz, and Ravi Ramamoorthi. 2004. Efficient BRDF importance sampling using a factored representation. In ACM SIGGRAPH 2004 Papers (SIGGRAPH '04). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 496–505.
Jason Lawrence, Szymon Rusinkiewicz, and Ravi Ramamoorthi. 2005. Adaptive numerical cumulative distribution functions for efficient importance sampling. In Proceedings of the Sixteenth Eurographics conference on Rendering Techniques (EGSR '05). Eurographics Association, Goslar, DEU, 11–20.
Wojciech Matusik, Hanspeter Pfister, Matt Brand, and Leonard McMillan. 2003. A data-driven reflectance model. ACM Trans. Graph. 22, 3 (July 2003), 759–769.

Week 6 -- Textures

Primary:

Frederick M. Weinhaus and Venkat Devarajan. 1997. Texture mapping 3D models of real-world scenes. ACM Comput. Surv. 29, 4 (December 1997), 325-365.

Supplemental:

Paul S. Heckbert, "A Survey of Texture Mapping" (figures), IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, November 1986, pp. 56-67

Kristin J. Dana, Bram Van Ginnekin, Shree K. Nayar, Jan J. Koenderink, "Reflectances and Texture of Real-World Surfaces", ACM Transaction on Graphics, Vol. 18, No. 1, Jan 1999, pp. 1-34.

Jim Blinn, "Simulation of Wrinkled Surfaces", Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 1978, pp. 286-292.
Ned Greene, "Environment Mapping and Other Applications of World Projections", IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, November 1986, pp. 21-29.

Week 6 -- Sampling & Antialiasing

Primary:

Franklin C. Crow, The aliasing problem in computer-generated shaded images, Communications of the ACM, Volume 20 , Issue 11 (November 1977), pp 799 - 805.

Supplemental:

Don P. Mitchell, Arun N. Netravali, Reconstruction filters in computer-graphics, Proceedings of the 15th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques (SIGGRAPH 88), pp 221 - 228.

Week 7 -- RenderMan/ Standards

Primary:

Pat Hanrahan and Jim Lawson, "A language for shading and lighting calculations", Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 1990, pp. 289-298.

Supplemental:

Gritz, L. and Hahn, J.K, "BMRT: A Global Illumination Implementation of the RenderMan Standard", Journal of Graphics Tools, Vol. 1, No. 3, pp. 29-47 (1996).
Philipp Slusallek, Thomas Pflaum, Hans-Peter Seidel, Implementing RenderMan: Practice, Problems and Enhancements, Computer Graphics Forum (Proc. Eurographics '94)
Ken Perlin, "An Image Synthesizer", Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 1985, pp. 287-296.
Karl Sims, "Artificial evolution for computer graphics", ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics, Vol. 25, Issue 4, July 1991, pp. 319-328
Rob L. Cook, "Shade Trees", Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 1984, pp. 223-23

Week 9 -- Rendering Equation

Primary:

James Kajiya, "The Rendering Equation", Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 1986, pp. 143-150.

Supplemental:

Rob L. Cook, Tom Porter, and Loren Carpenter, "Distributed Ray Tracing", Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 1984, pp. 135-145.
Paul Heckbert and Pat Hanrahan, "Beam Tracing Polygonal Objects", (available from this page in postscript format) Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 1984, pp. 119-127.
John Amanatides, "Ray Tracing With Cones", Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 1984, pp. 129-135.

Week 11 -- Radiosity

Primary:

Cindy Goral, Kenneth Torrance, and Donald Greenberg, "Modeling the Interaction of Light between Diffuse Surfaces", Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 1984, pp. 213-222.

Supplemental:

M.F. Cohen and D. Greenberg, "The Hemi-Cube: A Radiosity Solution of Complex Environments", Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 1985, pp. 31-40.
John Wallace, Michael Cohen, and Donald Greenberg, "A Two-Pass Solution to the Rendering Equation", Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 1987, pp. 311-324.
Steven Parker, William Martin, Peter-Pike J. Sloan, Peter Shirley, Brian Smits, and Charles Hansen, "Interactive Ray Tracing", Proceedings of the 1999 Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics, pp. 119-126

Week 11 -- Photon Mapping

Primary:

Henrik Wann Jensen, Per H. Christensen, "Efficient simulation of light transport in scenes with participating media using photon maps", Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 1998, pp 311-320.

Supplemental:

Claude Knaus and Matthias Zwicker. 2011. Progressive photon mapping: A probabilistic approach. ACM Trans. Graph. 30, 3, Article 25 (May 2011)
McGuire, M. and Luebke, D. 2009. Hardware-accelerated global illumination by image space photon mapping. In Proceedings of the Conference on High Performance Graphics 2009 (New Orleans, Louisiana, August 01 - 03, 2009). S. N. Spencer, D. McAllister, M. Pharr, and I. Wald, Eds. HPG '09. ACM, New York, NY, 77-89.

Week 12 -- Transparency

Primary:

Hašan, M., Fuchs, M., Matusik, W., Pfister, H., and Rusinkiewicz, S. 2010. "Physical reproduction of materials with specified subsurface scattering." In ACM SIGGRAPH 2010 Papers (Los Angeles, California, July 26 - 30, 2010). H. Hoppe, Ed. SIGGRAPH '10. ACM, New York, NY, 1-10.

Supplemental:

Hao, X. and Varshney, A. 2004. Real-time rendering of translucent meshes. ACM Trans. Graph. 23, 2 (Apr. 2004), 120-142.
Wills, J., Agarwal, S., Kriegman, D., and Belongie, S. 2009. Toward a perceptual space for gloss. ACM Trans. Graph. 28, 4 (Aug. 2009), 1-15.

Week 13 -- Tone Reproduction

Primary:

J. Tublin and H. Rushmeier, "Tone Reproduction for Realistic Images", IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, Vol. 13, No. 6, pp. 42-48, November 1993.
Erik Reinhard, Michael Stark, Peter Shirley, and James Ferwerda, "Photographic tone reproduction for digital images", ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG) , Proceedings of the 29th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, Volume 21 Issue 3, July 2002.

Supplementary

J.A. Ferwerda, S.N. Pattanaik, P. Shirley, D.P. Greenberg, "A Model of Visual Adaptation for Realistic Image Synthesis",, Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 1996, pp. 249-258.
J. Geigel, F.K.Musgrave, "A Model for Simulating the Photographic Development Process on Digital Images" Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 1997, pp. 135-143.
Ward, Gregory, "High Dynamic Range Imaging," Proceedings of the Ninth Color Imaging Conference, November 2001.

S. N. Pattanak, J.A. Ferwerda, M.D. Fairchild, and D.P. Greenberg, "A Multiscale Model of Adaptation and Spatial Vision for Realistic Image Display", Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 1998, pp. 287-298.
Raanan Fattal, Dani Lischimski, and Michael Werman, "Gradient Domain High Dynamic Range Compression", ACM Transactions on Graphics, Vol. 21, No. 3, July 2002. (Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2002), pp. 249-256.," Proceedings of the Sixth Color Imaging Conference, November 1998.

G. Ward, "A Contrast-based Scalefactor for Luminance Display", Graphics Gems IV, P.S. Heckbert (Ed), Boston: Academic Press Professional, pp. 415-421, 1994.
Francesco Banterle, Alessandro Artusi, Elena Sikudova, Thomas Bashford-Rogers, Patrick Ledda, Marina Bloj, and Alan Chalmers. 2012. Dynamic range compression by differential zone mapping based on psychophysical experiments. In Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Applied Perception (SAP '12). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 39-46. DOI=10.1145/2338676.2338685 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2338676.2338685
Ashikhmin, M. and Goyal, J. 2006. "A reality check for tone-mapping operators." ACM Trans. Appl. Percept. 3, 4 (Oct. 2006), 399-411.
Mantiuk, R., Daly, S., and Kerofsky, L. 2008. "Display adaptive tone mapping." In ACM SIGGRAPH 2008 Papers (Los Angeles, California, August 11 - 15, 2008). SIGGRAPH '08. ACM, New York, NY, 1-10.

Week 14 -- Advanced Tone Reproduction

Supplementary:

Drago, Frédéric, Karol Myszkowski, Thomas Annen, and Norishige Chiba. "Adaptive logarithmic mapping for displaying high contrast scenes." In Computer graphics forum, vol. 22, no. 3, pp. 419-426. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, Inc, 2003.
G. W. Larson, H. Rushmeier and C. Piatko, "A visibility matching tone reproduction operator for high dynamic range scenes," in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, vol. 3, no. 4, pp. 291-306, Oct.-Dec. 1997, doi: 10.1109/2945.646233.

Week 14 -- Advanced Camera Models

Primary:

Craig Kolb, Don Mitchell, and Pat Hanrahan, "A realistic camera model for computer graphics", Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 1995, pp. 317-324.

Supplementary:

M.Potmesil and I. Chakravarty, "A Lens and Aperture Camera Model for Synthetic Image Generation", Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 1981, pp. 297-305.
Matthias Hullin, Elmar Eisemann, Hans-Peter Seidel, and Sungkil Lee. 2011. Physically-based real-time lens flare rendering. In ACM SIGGRAPH 2011 papers (SIGGRAPH '11), Hugues Hoppe (Ed.). ACM, New York, NY, USA, , Article 108 , 10 pages
Wolfgang Heidrich, Phillip Slusallek, and Hans-Peter Seidel, "An Image-Based Model for Realistic Lens Systems in Interactive Computer Graphics", Proceedings of Graphics Interface 97, pp. 68-75.
Lee, S., Eisemann, E., and Seidel, H. 2010. "Real-time lens blur effects and focus control." In ACM SIGGRAPH 2010 Papers (Los Angeles, California, July 26 - 30, 2010). H. Hoppe, Ed. SIGGRAPH '10. ACM, New York, NY, 1-7.
Lin, H. and Gu, K. 2007. Photo-realistic depth-of-field effects synthesis based on real camera parameters. In Proceedings of the 3rd international Conference on Advances in Visual Computing - Volume Part I (Lake Tahoe, NV, USA, November 26 - 28, 2007). G. Bebis, R. Boyle, B. Parvin, D. Koracin, N. Paragios, S. Tanveer, T. Ju, Z. Liu, S. Coquillart, C. Cruz-Neira, T. Müller, and T. Malzbender, Eds. Lecture Notes In Computer Science. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, 298-309.

Week 14 -- High Dynamic Range Images

Primary:

Paul Debevec, "Rendering Synthetic Objects into Real Scenes: Bridging Traditional and Image-based Graphics with Global Illumination and High Dynamic Range Photography", Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 1998, pp. 189-198.

Supplemental:

Seetzen, Helge, W. Heidrich, W. Stuezlinger, G. Ward, L. Whitehead, M. Trentacoste, A. Ghosh, A. Vorozcovs, "High Dynamic Range Display Systems," ACM Trans. Graph. (special issue SIGGRAPH 2004), August 2004.

last updated 1/4/2025