Ray tracing is a very important artificial image generation technique. Due to simulation of geometrical optics, the resulting images are often indistinguishable from real photographs. Almost all animation movies are generated by advanced ray tracing techniques. Furthermore, due to GPU acceleration and parallel computing opportunities, ray tracing has the potential to replace the traditional forward rendering pipeline in a near future.

This course aims to familiarize graduate level students with the realistic, advanced, and physically based ray tracing techniques. Students will learn about how light propagates in space and in various participating media and learn how to simulate it on the computer. Students will learn about various acceleration strategies both by using smart algorithms and data structures as well as by using graphics hardware.