A Fast Rendering Method for Refractive and Reflective Caustics Due to Water Surfaces

In order to synthesize realistic images of scenes that include water surfaces, the rendering of optical effects caused by waves on the water surface, such as caustics and reflection, is necessary. However, rendering caustics is quite complex and time-consuming. In recent years, the performance of graphics hardware has made significant progress. This fact encourages researchers to study the acceleration of realistic image synthesis. We present here a method for the fast rendering of refractive and reflective caustics due to water surfaces. In the proposed method, an object is expressed by a set of texture mapped slices. We calculate the intensities of the caustics on the object by using the slices and store the intensities as textures. This makes it possible to render caustics at interactive rate by using graphics hardware. Moreover, we render objects that are reflected and refracted due to the water surface by using reflection/refraction mapping of these slices.