History
Further information: Rendering, Chronology of important published ideasThe rendering equation and its use in computer graphics was presented by James Kajiya in 1986. Path Tracing was introduced then as an algorithm to find a numerical solution to the integral of the rendering equation. A decade later, Lafortune suggested many refinements, including bidirectional path tracing.
Metropolis light transport, a method of perturbing previously found paths in order to increase performance for difficult scenes, was introduced in 1997 by Eric Veach and Leonidas J. Guibas.
More recently, CPUs and GPUs have become powerful enough to render images more quickly, causing more widespread interest in path tracing algorithms. Tim Purcell first presented a global illumination algorithm running on a GPU in 2002. In February 2009 Austin Robison of Nvidia demonstrated the first commercial implementation of a path tracer running on a GPU, and other implementations have followed, such as that of Vladimir Koylazov in August 2009. This was aided by the maturing of GPGPU programming toolkits such as CUDA and OpenCL and GPU ray tracing SDKs such as OptiX.
Read more about this topic: Path Tracing
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.”
—Henry James (1843–1916)
“A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)