Particle Tracing Methods in Photorealistic Image Synthesis Rázsó István Márk rezso@inf.bme.hu Department of Control Engineering and Information Technology Technical University of Budapest Budapest, Hungary

    In rendering we are interested in generating pictures of an artifically described environment. The goal is to generate images which look like pictures taken with a real camera. This requires to calculate the power reaching the camera from a given direction, i.e. through a given pixel. The rendering equation describes the reflected radiance from a surface point x:

where and are the direction of the reflected incoming radiance. is the BRDF (Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function) at , is the incoming radiance and is the incoming flux. Different methods have been used to evaluate this equation. To describe the incoming radiance at a surface point, global illumination methods have been used, which can be divided to radiosity methods and methods using particle tracing.