Bob Lewis
UBC
This talk will describe a new algorithm for solving the global illumination problem in computer graphics. Brief discussions of photorealistic rendering and of radiation physics will lead to the "light-driven" algorithm itself, which addresses four current challenges in rendering: increased scene complexity, improved shadow detail, incorporating real lighting and reflectance data into synthetic images, and combining synthetic images with real ones.
Practical efficiency of the algorithm requires a compact representation of light in a scene. We will see how wavelet basis functions provide this and, in addition, how the transport and surface interaction equations can be formulated directly in terms of wavelets.
Bob Lewis is a doctoral candidate in Computer Science at the University of British Columbia. He received a B. S. in Physics from Harvey Mudd College, an M. A. in Astronomy from the University of California at Berkeley, and an M. S. in Computer Science and Engineering from the Oregon Graduate Institute. In addition, he has been employed as a senior software engineer for General Electric/CALMA, COMSAT General Integrated Systems, Tektronix, and Test Systems Strategies. He is a member of ACM-SIGGRAPH and IEEE-Computer Society.