Updated: Mar 25, 2015


Poisson-Based Continuous Surface Generation for Goal-Based Caustics  

Yonghao Yue, Kei Iwasaki, Bing-Yu Chen, Yoshinori Dobashi, and Tomoyuki Nishita

Columbia University     Wakayama University     National Taiwan University     Hokkaido University      Hiroshima Shudo University
                             UEI Research                    UEI Research                   UEI Research                    UEI Research
     
Abstract:

We present a technique for computing the shape of a transparent object that can generate user-defined caustic patterns. The surface of the object generated using our method is smooth. Thanks to this property, the resulting caustic pattern is smooth, natural, and highly detailed compared to the results obtained using previous methods. Our method consists of two processes. First, we use a differential geometry approach to compute a smooth mapping between the distributions of the incident light and the light reaching the screen. Second, we utilize this mapping to compute the surface of the object. We solve Poisson's equation to compute both the mapping and the surface of the object.

Keywords:

Caustics, surface generation, continuous, Poisson equation


ACM Transactions on Graphics Vol.33, No.3, pp.31:1-7 (presented at SIGGRAPH 2014)

Paper: PDF(8.4MB)
Video: VIDEO(36.3MB)