This project focuses on the creation of extreme realistic images and movies of diamonds and their surroundings.
The commercially available systems for visualizing diamonds are limited
to nearly real images. These programs are very fast and useful for
calculating optical properties of diamond cuts. If we want to create
images of photographic quality for use in advertising, education or
promotion these programs are not good enough. This project will find
methods to improve the realism of the images in a reasonable time frame.
The tool to achieve this, ray tracing, has the problem that it is time
consuming. Integrating new techniques like bi-directional path tracing
and advanced randomized sampling techniques will remove or diminish this
disadvantage. Next to algorithm improvements also hardware related
techniques and parallel computing will improve the performance.

Algorithm design and testing