ECS 275 Assignment #3 - Radiosity/Photon Mapping

Due Date: February 18, 2011

In this project, you have the choice to implement radiosity or photon mapping.

If you would decide to implement radiosity, create/Find a model of a room with an area light source on the ceiling, and some furniture or boxes on the floor. Write a radiosity program to solve for the global illumination effects, and create a rendered image. Use the hemicube method to compute the form factors. Extend your raytracer to render the final image and the hemicube faces. You may use Gauss-Seidel iteration to solve for the radiosities, or any other linear equation solver. If you did not write your own solver, state where you obtain it. In this project, while GPU acceleration is not required for radiosity calculations, you are encouraged to achieve as much speedup as possible.

If you would decide to realize photon mapping, demonstrate caustics and diffuse interreflections. Furthermore, you should also extend your renderer to include participating media. Again, accelerate calculations as much as possible.

Again, remember to put the best images you have created for this project on your web page!