←back to thread

Physically Based Rendering: From Theory to Implementation

(pbr-book.org)
218 points ahamez | 2 comments | 13 Jan 25 14:28 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
Show context
crispyambulance ◴[16 Jan 25 17:56 UTC] No.42728529[source]▶
Every time I see stuff like this it makes me think about optical design software.

There are applications (Zemax, for example) that are used to design optical systems (lens arrangements for cameras, etc). These applications are eye-wateringly expensive-- like similar in pricing to top-class EDA software licenses.

With the abundance GPU's and modern UI's, I wonder how much work would be involved for someone to make optical design software that blows away the old tools. It would be ray-tracing, but with interesting complications like accounting for polarization, diffraction, scattering, fluorescence, media effects beyond refraction like like birefringence and stuff like Kerr and Pockels, etc.

replies(10): >>42728932 #>>42728962 #>>42729610 #>>42730664 #>>42730756 #>>42731720 #>>42732069 #>>42733041 #>>42736387 #>>42739407 #
1. Q6T46nT668w6i3m ◴[16 Jan 25 20:52 UTC] No.42730756[source]▶
You’d be surprised! Everywhere I’ve worked, academic or industry, typically writes their own simulation software. Sometimes it’s entirely handwritten (i.e., end-to-end, preprocessing to simulation to evaluation), sometimes it’ll leverage a pre-existing open source package. I imagine this will become more and more common if, for no other reason, you can’t back-propagate an OpticStudio project and open source automatic differentiation packages are unbeatable.
replies(1): >>42731743 #
2. lcrs ◴[16 Jan 25 22:31 UTC] No.42731743[source]▶
If you're interested in the equivalent of "backprop through zemax" there are a few projects going on to jointly optimize optical designs with the image processing, e.g. check out: https://vccimaging.org/Publications/Wang2022DiffOptics/