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Recently I saw watched his QuakeCon talk from 2013, "Principles of Light and Rendering" at QuakeCon. It helped me solidify a lot of the basic understanding of 3D rendering I already had and provided a lot of additional knowledge as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyUgHPs86XM

A very interesting question!

It's not a research paper, but for learning purposes there's nothing better than the Physically-Based Rendering (PBRT) book by Matt Pharr, Greg Humphreys and Wenzel Jakob, already mentioned by others in this thread: http://www.pbrt.org/

One of the foundational paper is definitely The Rendering Equation, by James Kajiya: https://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs294-13/fa09/lectures/p143-...

Another highly influencial research paper is certainly Eric Veach's PhD thesis, Robust Monte Carlo Methods For Light Transport Simulation (a.k.a. "The Bible"): http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/veach_thesis/thesis.pdf

A few other paper stand out:

Understanding the Masking-Shadowing Function in Microfacet-Based BRDFs, by Eric Heitz: http://jcgt.org/published/0003/02/03/. A somewhat difficult read, but an important paper.

Microfacet Models for Refraction through Rough Surfaces: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~srm/publications/EGSR07-btdf.pdf

Physically-Based Shading at Disney: https://disney-animation.s3.amazonaws.com/library/s2012_pbs_...

A Practical Model for Subsurface Light Transport, by Henrik Wann Jensen: https://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/bssrdf/bssrdf.pdf

Light Transport Simulation with Vertex Connection and Merging: http://cgg.mff.cuni.cz/~jaroslav/papers/2012-vcm/

Finally, for learning, there's a nice lecture by John Carmack at QuakeCon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyUgHPs86XM

⬐ generic_user

Excellent list, I had not seen some of these. Time to fire up Mathematica and get some coffee I suppose. And I'm sure the list is helpful for many others also.

If you liked his talk, definitely check out his QuakeCon keynotes and his talk about physically based lighting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wt-iVFxgFWk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uooh0Y9fC_M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyUgHPs86XM

⬐ Sammi

I've watched the one on lighting twice, just cause it blew my mind so much. I finally (think I) understand light.

⬐ DonHopkins

When I first read that, I thought "lighting" was some kind of mind altering drug. It is, if you do it right! ;)

⬐ iamshs

I finished watching first one, and my admiration for him grows even more. Immense knowledge with a gift of presenting mere facts. What a likable personality. Thanks for the links.

It uses same algorightms 3d engines use to compute lightning and shadows

http://youtu.be/IyUgHPs86XM

should be easy to implement in hardware in GPU.

BTW I seem to remember vaguely Carmack wanted to implement fully software 3D sound engine for Doom3, but some patent dispute forced ID to support Creative EAX.

⬐ jo_

Yeah. Carmack wanted to calculate the distortion of the ear-canal on positional audio and to calculate the effects of sound diffusion off of surfaces like light. Creative owns patents on both of those techniques. :(

⬐ kgabis

It's quite different from what we do. However we also do have working GPU implementations in CUDA and OpenCL :)

⬐ rasz_pl

looks like you shoot rays around from the player

⬐ kgabis

It's not that easy (unfortunately). Those are sound paths.

⬐ jbarrow

I have to admit, I thought it was just pretty standard ray-tracing as well. I'd be curious to find out how it's different. I followed the link through to the website, but didn't see much additional information on it.

⬐ kgabis

It's different mostly due to diffraction which is neglible in case of light and very important when simulating sound.

⬐ nitrogen

Diffusion is important for light too; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiosity

⬐ kgabis

Diffusion is not diffraction, they're different phenomena.

⬐ nitrogen

Radiosity simulates diffusion, though. Are you saying you also simulate diffraction? In visual rendering, that might fall under something called "caustics" or "photons" (I use quote marks because renderer photons are not quite the same as real photons).

⬐ kgabis

Caustics are caused by refraction or reflection, not diffraction. There are many analogies between simulating light and sound, but you take different shortcuts to make those simulations fast. E.g. you don't simulate diffraction when simulating light (it's effect is neglible) and you discard small objects when simulating sound. Those differences exist mostly because visible light spectrum and hearable sound spectrum are so far apart.