Papers by David M. Laur


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Ray Tracing for the Movie 'Cars'

Per H. Christensen, Julian Fong, David M. Laur, Dana Batali
September 2006

This paper describes how we extended Pixar's RenderMan renderer with ray tracing abilities. In order to ray trace highly complex scenes we use multiresolution geometry and texture caches, and use ray differentials to determine the appropriate resolution. With this method we are able to efficiently ray trace scenes with much more geometry and ... [more]

Available in Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Interactive Ray Tracing 2006, pages 1-6. IEEE 2006


Ray Differentials and Multiresolution Geometry Caching for Distribution Ray Tracing in Complex Scenes

Per H. Christensen, David M. Laur, Julian Fong, Wayne L. Wooten, Dana Batali
September 2003

When rendering only directly visible objects, ray tracing a few levels of specular reflection from large, low curvatures surfaces, and ray tracing shadows from point-like light sources, the accessed geometry is coherent and a geometry cache performs well. But in many other cases, ... [more]

Published as pp. pp. 543-552 in Computer Graphics Forum (Eurographics 2003 Conference Proceedings), Blackwell Publishers, September 2003.


RenderMan, Theory and Practice

Dana Batali, Byron Bashforth, Chris Bernardi, Per H. Christensen, David M. Laur, Christophe Hery, Guido Quaroni, Erin Tomson, Thomas Jordan, Wayne L. Wooten
July 2003

Siggraph 2003 course notes.