As I sat down to carefully read about photon mapping and think it through, one big question popped up that is stopping me from moving on:
Where should I be building this photon map?
The photon map is view independent, and is static unless something in the scene changes. Thus, it makes sense to build it on the CPU side (Javascript) then pass it down to the shader to do per-pixel ray tracing. However, I have read a few articles (including John CIS565 lecture) that mentions constructing the photon map on the shader, and how it can give a better performance.
Right now, CPU side construction makes more logical sense to me. However, if I choose to do this, I would have to re-implement all the intersection code for shapes, and move the scene from shader back to Javascript, which will be a bit more work. I also will need to look into how I can pass non-primitive data structures down to the shader.
Anyone who knows anything about this please advise?
Hi Nop,
ReplyDeleteI know I mentioned this to you a few days ago, but you might want to look at DART (google's new web language) http://www.dartlang.org/
It seems to have stronger typing and is closely to the traditional C++/Java syntax and style.
-David