Stochastic Progressive Photon Mapping for Dynamic Scenes

Figure 1: Dynamic Stochastic Progressive Photon Mapping allows the computation of animations containing difficult light paths, like the caustics visible from the camera through an animated water surface. In contrast to an SPPM simulation for each frame, we obtain a speedup of 3.5. Stochastic Progressive Photon Mapping (SPPM) is a method to simulate consistent global illumination. It is especially useful for complicated light paths like caustics seen through a glass surface. Up to now, SPPM can only be applied to a static scene and noise-free images require hours to compute. Our approach is to extend this method to dynamic scenes (DSPPM) for an efficient simulation of animated objects and materials. We identify both hit point and photon information that can be re-used for the pixel statistics of multiple frames. In comparison to an SPPM simulation performed for each frame, we achieve a 1.96- 9.53 speedup in our test scenes without changing correctness or simulation quality. This is the authors preprint. The definitive version of the paper is available a