Stanford CS348B, Spring 2022

IMAGE SYNTHESIS TECHNIQUES

High-quality rendering is ubiquitous today, with applications ranging from entertainment to product design and architecture. The goal of this course is to provide a deep understanding of the fundamental mathematical and physical principles that are the basis of modern physically based rendering while also introducing the design principles and engineering trade-offs involved in designing and implementing high-performance rendering systems.

Basic Info

Tues/Thurs 3:15-4:45pm

Location: 380-380F

Instructors: Kayvon Fatahalian, Doug James, and Matt Pharr

See the course info page for more info on policies and logistics.

Spring 2022 Schedule

Mar 29		The Goals of Rendering How advanced image synthesis is used in the real world, review of ray tracing basics
Mar 31		Ray Tracing I: Basic Algorithms Representing rays, ray-object intersection methods, acceleration structures, pbrt basics
Apr 05		Ray Tracing 2: Practical Issues how to build acceleration structures efficiently (two-level, refitting, incremental builds), advanced primitive types, tessellation, numerical precision issues
Apr 07		Radiometry, Photometry, and the Light Field Definition of radiometric quantities, the light field, integrating total energy falling on surfaces
Apr 12		Monte Carlo I: Integration Sampling from distributions and shapes, numerical estimation of illumination
Apr 14		Cameras and Lenses Basics of how lenses and sensors work, motion blur and depth of field
Apr 19		Signal Processing and Sampling Primal and Fourier space representations of signals, convolution theorem, sampling theorem, aliasing and anti-aliasing
Apr 21		Reflection Models 1 BRDFs, the reflection equation, basic reflection models
Apr 26		Reflection Models 2 Advanced surface models
Apr 28		Direct Illumination 1 Monte Carlo estimation of the reflection equation, sampling lights and BRDFs
May 03		Direct Illumination 2: MC Variance Reduction Monte Carlo variance reduction techniques, stratified sampling, importance sampling
May 05		Global Illumination and Path Tracing The rendering equation, path tracing, Russian roulette, path guiding
May 10		Bidirectional Light Transport Light tracing, bidirectional path tracing, photon mapping
May 12		Participating Media and Volume Rendering Scattering and phase functions, the volume rendering equation, null scattering
May 17		Final Project Proposals Slide presentations and discussion
May 19		Reflection Models 3: Subsurface Scattering and Anisotropy Anisotropic surfaces, subsurface scattering
May 24		Real-time Ray Tracing and Denoising Algorithms for reducing variance at low sampling count (ReSTIR), conventional and DNN-based denoising
May 26		Monte Carlo 2: Low Discrepancy Sampling Discrepancy and Quasi-Monte Carlo, low-discrepancy constructions, spectral analysis of sampling
May 31		Final Class ExTraVaGaNZa! Three parts: (1) guided sampling [Kayvon & Vishnu], (2) warped rendering [Doug], and (3) course wrap-up [Matt] (on-going research and how to get involved).

Assignments

Apr 12	HW 1: PBRT Lighting Design
Apr 21	HW 2: A Ray Marching-Based Distance Estimator
May 3	HW 3: Light Field Cameras