Ray Tracing for Global Illumination

This course covers techniques for realistic computer graphics rendering that consider global illumination, that is, light from light sources bouncing multiple times on object surfaces in the scene before illuminating the surface being shaded. The radiosity method is briefly discussed, but most of the course is spent on recursive stochastic ray tracing, which uses Monte Carlo integration to estimate the multidimensional integrals involved in global illumination. Topics covered include direct and indirect illumination, penumbras from area light sources, anti-aliasing, irradiance caching, and bidirectional path tracing. These lectures are in conjunction with the textbook “Advanced Global Illumination,” second edition by Philip Dutre, Philippe Bekaert and Kavita Bala.