Saturday, June 2, 2007

Top utility papers of all time

This is heavily biased toward rendering, but here are what I consider the most useful papers at present. Many great papers have of course been obviated by improvements so this list is far from a "best paper" list. These are papers worth reading now.

Recursively generated B-spline surfaces on arbitrary topological meshes, Catmull and Clark, 1978. No sign of fading away!


An improved illumination model for shaded display Whitted, 1980. Beware the 1/r^2 mistake but otherwise about as perfect a paper as there is!

Distributed Ray Tracing Cook, 1984. There are some sampling details you can find elsewhere, but all the basic ideas are here.

Ray Casting for Modeling Solids, Roth, 1982. A sweet CSG algorithm.

An Image Synthesizer, Perlin 1985. See his later paper and his webpage for more info on noise.

(more coming later-- suggestions welcome)

7 comments:

Sebastian Mach said...

Thank you again for your hints!

I'd suggest a paper about units of Global Illumination (actually units of photo-/radiometry). What I mean by this is a paper with good explanations on the units and how they are related to CG and Global Illumination Rendering.

So far I've only found papers which either assume you are familiar with the units, or papers which are purely "photo-/radiometric".

In the beginning of my efforts in the GI discipline I really missed such work, and until today, I'm only rendering on a vague base, based on my interpretations of the rendering algebra. That means, even if can (...) render realistic images, I don't really know how "bright" they are with respect to the units.

My suggestion sounds a bit stupid, and, as far as I remember, e.g. Eric Veach had some good references in the first chapters, but what I am looking for is some sort of good "handbook" or an introduction "for dummies" (it is hard from time to time to keep track of all the knowledge if you have only some spare time to invest on that giant topic called Computer Graphics)

Shrey said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Unknown said...

Just a heads up - the "ray casting for modeling solids" link is broken...

qu1j0t3 said...

Broken link on Ray Casting paper? I think I've been looking for that one for years; I had a copy in the 80s but lost it.

Hector Yee said...

Hi Pete! I am glad you started a graphics blog!

I found Phil's global illumination compendium pretty useful.

Not quite a paper but a handy collection of formula online.

Hector Yee said...

Whoops the link for GI compendium is fixed here.

Robin Green said...

What, no papers about Ray Tracing Jello?