If you read papers about subsurface scattering, you'll frequently come across references to something called the "dipole approximation". This term seems to go back to the paper A Practical Model for Subsurface Light Transport by Henrik Wann Jensen et al, but this paper is pretty difficult to und...

Trichoplax question aroused my curiosity and the answers in this question also reminded me why I sometimes use different gamma "amounts" to enhance images. Therefore, is it possible to determine the amount of gamma applied to an image by knowing its source (the original image)? I.e. can the math...

Bicubic sampling is pretty good for up sampling an image and making it larger, but is it a good choice for down sampling as well? Are there better choices?

Start with a precalculated "ray cloud" - the starting point and direction of a large number of rays, most of which will not contribute to the image. The image plane's position and orientation are then specified, and the task is to search the ray cloud for rays that intersect the image plane witho...

I want to render realistic images of water in an orbiting space habitat. The image does not need to be generated in real time, although I wouldn't want it to take weeks either. I'm looking for an approach that can generate realistic images in hours or days. The habitat is cylindrical with the cu...

Young's double slit experiment is very simple to set up and simple to explain, but it is an example of both diffraction and interference, neither of which are modelled by conventional raytracing. It is straightforward to render an approximation of the result using textures, but that would requir...

Is it realistic to render a super-high resolution image over an array of 3 by 3 or 5 by 5 (for example) stacked screens? Could I do this by combining several different GPUs, or would the only way be to use a GPU per screen and simply divide the image to be rendered? Ideally I'd like to be able t...