Title
The Path to Path-Traced Movies.
Abstract
Path tracing is one of several techniques to render photorealistic images by simulating the physics of light propagation within a scene. The roots of path tracing are outside of computer graphics, in the Monte Carlo simulations developed for neutron transport. A great strength of path tracing is that it is conceptually, mathematically, and often-times algorithmically simple and elegant, yet it is very general. Until recently, however, brute-force path tracing techniques were simply too noisy and slow to be practical for movie production rendering. They therefore received little usage outside of academia, except perhaps to generate an occasional reference image to validate the correctness of other faster but less general rendering algorithms. The last ten years have seen a dramatic shift in this balance, and path tracing techniques are now widely used. This shift was partially fueled by steadily increasing computational power and memory, but also by significant improvements in sampling, rendering, and denoising techniques. In this survey, we provide an overview of path tracing and highlight important milestones in its development that have led to it becoming the preferred movie rendering technique today.
Year
DOI
Venue
2016
10.1561/0600000073
Foundations and Trends in Computer Graphics and Vision
Keywords
Field
DocType
Computer Graphics,Rendering,Rendering: Forward rendering
Computer graphics (images),Path tracing,3D rendering,Computer science,Real-time rendering,Ray tracing (graphics),Image-based modeling and rendering,Software rendering,Rendering (computer graphics),Tiled rendering
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
10
2
1572-2740
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
1
0.37
0
Authors
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Per H. Christensen1102.72
Wojciech Jarosz2104160.39