Image Synthesis - Project 10

In Project 10, we were to implement participating media. Participating media involves computing physical bounces of light in media such as fog, dust, smoke, etc. where the light bounces around inside the volume instead of just diffusing, reflecting, or refracting.

To implement this, I used the standard marching technique through an axis-aligned bounding box. A ray was sampled multiple times across its vector using small steps. When these steps were inside the bounding volume, they probabilisitcally hit some of the media.

In the figure below, participating media is used to simulate a gaseous volume under the cube. Right now my code is very ineffecient and took six hours to get these results. Earlier images not requiring participating media required far less time to converge