UC Santa Barbara

Today’s rendering and light transport frameworks are formulated strictly under the context of ray optics. However, many applications often call for taking the wave nature of light into consideration. This has been historically challenging, mainly because wave-optical descriptors of light are neither linear nor local, frustrating the applications of classical rendering and path-tracing techniques. Today, such path-tracing techniques power most of the complex computer-generated content in films and movies, however wave solvers struggle with scenes that would be considered exceedingly simple by the rendering community. The purpose of this work is to generalize classical path-tracing techniques to physical optics. We introduce physical light transport (PLT), a framework which represents the wave nature of light globally in a scene, and is consistent with Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism. We show how a wave-optical system can be sampled using generalized rays, i.e. local and linear classical-like point queries of the wave-optical system. These generalized rays enable the application of essentially arbitrary sampling methods, but to do so under rigorous wave optics. Therefore, our work serves as a link between computer graphics’ path tracing and computational optics methods.