Pane

Kevin Beason's Ray Tracing Page

This is the project page for Pane, a physically based renderer (global illumination ray tracer). Pane is a work in progress. See below for the latest images. Basic features are:

Photon mapping and Monte-Carlo path tracing
Reads Inventor / VRML 1.0 files
Octree-R ray-triangle intersection acceleration
HDR Image based lighting, depth of field, irradiance caching, glare, bump-mapping, texture-mapping, animation support, etc.

Work log contains the latest development information (old log)
Acknowledgements
Features
Source code
Images
Bibliography
Requirements Specification
Design Documentation
README file
To-do list

Acknowledgements

Thank you:

David Banks my graduate advisor and mentor, for teaching and support
Josh Grant for the original idea of using Inventor to read the scene file. Parsing a scene file was the most frightening aspect and OIV does it for free.
Chris Baker for the idea of using an octree, which got me started on this whole shebang
Chuck Mason for teaching me how to use STL and debug with gdb
Chris Weigle, for a bug report
Henrik Jensen for the Photon mapping algorithm and ideas presented in his invaluable book
Peter Shirley for his essential book on ray tracing
The many authors of papers I referred to
FSU, including all the systems operators I annoyed regularly.
NSF

I would also like to thank the following students at other universities who have also implemented Photon Mapping, and whose websites were inspiring:

Other inspiring renderers:

Sunflow
Many more...

Features implemented so far

Read geometry from regular Inventor (VRML) files
Interactive scene viewer, renderer
Command line renderer
Octree for fast ray-triangle intersection
Recursive ray tracing
Reflection, refraction (with attenuation)
Writes PPM image format
Tone mapping
Can set image size, number of samples, level of recursion
Area and point lights
Physically based lighting using SI metrics of meters and watts
Importance sampling multiple luminaires

Monte Carlo path tracing (slow global illumination solution)
Separate global and caustic photon maps
Photon mapping using algorithm described in Jensen's book (4 component, faster global illumination solution)
Automatic maximum search radius for photon map irradiance estimate
Precomputed irradiance
Quasi-random sequences for sampling, path tracing, emission (optional)
Normal, color, emission, shininess, transparency interpolation on triangles
Texture mapping with bilinear interpolation and hermite smoothing
Depth of field
HDR Image Based Lighting (MCPT and Photon Mapping)
Beer's law
Participating media (single scattering only)
Glare simulation (both Shirley and Nakamae)
Bump mapping
Fresnel reflection (metallic)

Download Source code

pane-1.272.tar.gz
Latest snapshot.
- ...
pane-1.194.tar.gz
Should work on Fedora Core 4, Mac OS X 10.4, Ubuntu 7.10. New in this version:
- --compressEstimate for shrinking photon gather sphere vertically.
- --depthImage for creating a depth image in .pfm format.
- Three tools to convert .pfm files: pfmtohdr, pfmtoexr, pfmtopng
- Tons of bug fixes.
pane-1.127.tar.gz Works on Redhat 7.3, Fedora Core 4, Mac OS X 10.4. Adds several features: efficient full global illumination with HDR image based lighting, simulated glare, Beer's law attenuation, importance sampling indirect illumination, importance sampling the photon map
License: I am seeking to release all source under a free license (probably GPL) but currently my ability to do so is in question by university policy. Currently the license is "unknown". More to come.

Images

Bibliography