UC San Diego

Diffraction has been relatively untapped so far in the rendering environment. By making some tweaks to an existing renderer, specifically its light handling ability, an effective diffraction grating can be simulated and used. Previous approaches to the problem have been computational heavy or produced unrealistic results, and all of them were focused solely on simulating optical disks. This approach creates a usable ray tracing component that allows for general diffraction, which can be applied in numerous ways, including optical media.