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Regardless of particles or waves you can solve a bunch of cool problems with this one equation - our much beloved centrally important "volume rendering equation". But d'Eon thinks we should look further than just other research areas that have looked at light , he feels we should look to areas like neutron transport - literally nuclear physics of a pre-computer era.
And on Day One in , at 9. The ICTT is 46 years old, and to our knowledge this was only the second time a 'Hollywood type' presented! The first was 2 years earlier when both d'Eon and Jerry Tessendorf presented in Portland! Of course, d'Eon was heavily supported in his work by Weta Digital at the time, and their reputation along with d'Eon's is very strong outside just the CG community.
Still it was a great honor. In researching these questions he discovered neutron transport theory from the s. And Ishimaru simply cited this book on nuclear reactor theory and moves on with another approach and I was like, wait what was that!?? Having now discovered this world of old yet incredible relevant research, "I wanted more," says d'Eon, "lots more - I wanted it all.
And it was a struggle. Notation and terminology also took a while to get used to. Most of the text books are old and out of date and expensive. But he did, finding for example a book Grosjean published in with complete and exact solutions for all iostropic point source problems in infinite media and, ignoring d'Eon's own citations of it, it had only been cited six times in over 60 years.
Literally it is a gold mine and no one knew it even existed. By August this year d'Eon had collected over 4, papers on transport theory! And thus the role of librarian is an easy position to now see.
This work can be directly mapped back to both current research in nuclear physics and work published in the s - and completely unused in CG until now. The work does not stop there.
But it is not all a one way street, in our world of CG there is little work that would equate to bi-directional path tracing and the CG concept of multiple importance sampling - so important since the work of Eric Veach he won a Sci-tech for his thesis this year. At least four different groups or fields of science are independently are looking at the same generalization of transport theory that includes the classical exponential form as a special case:.
This image above for example is of "fractal fog" and was done with a modification of the Mitsuba physically based renderer to include non-exponential transport as a first-class citizen of the renderer by computing next-event estimation with a non-beer-lambert attenuation and sampling free path steps using the generalized FPD free path distribution functions.
To the best of d'Eon's knowledge, it is the first image to include this new form of generalized transport theory in a path tracer. Arvo and Kirk were the first proponents of the particle transport message for graphics". His closing remarks were to point out that these complex issues and maths we face are not ours alone to solve and radiative transfer is just one of several possible paths of research.
The show will pose and solve numerous scientific quandaries, telling some emotional human-interest stories along the way. Can cutting-edge robotic exoskeletons enable a disabled father to walk again and fulfill his dream of walking his daughter down the aisle? Is the suction power of your household vacuum cleaner strong enough to lift a person? How is science influencing the future of technology? If you haven't already got a water cooler then frankly you are going to have to buy one just so you can talk about this show.
We're doing some things that I think people are going to be genuinely amazed by. I am, however, slightly disappointed to not be presenting this alone.
Romesh Ranganathan taught mathematics before becoming a stand-up comedian. Entertainment , Quiz show , Video. Related Episodes Ep 2 Week 08 A brand new entertainment series that celebrates science and the world around us through thrilling, big-scale experiments and emotive personal stories.