TU Wien Rendering #5 – The Fresnel Equation and Schlick’s Approximation

What portion of light is reflected and refracted by glass-like surfaces? The Fresnel equation shows us why we see such strong reflections in windows from grazing angles, and why it’s so simple to look through them. Schlick’s approximation of the original equation provides simple and powerful means that can be computed rapidly. However, it has its own limitations. I wonder what they are? In this segment, we try to find out!

About the course:
This course aims to give an overview of basic and state-of-the-art methods of rendering. Offline methods such as ray and path tracing, photon mapping and many other algorithms are introduced and various refinement are explained.

The basics of the involved physics, such as geometric optics, surface and media interaction with light and camera models are outlined.

The apparatus of Monte Carlo methods is introduced which is heavily used in several algorithms and its refinement in the form of stratified sampling and the Metropolis-Hastings method is explained.

At the end of the course students should be familiar with common techniques in rendering and find their way around the current state-of-the-art of the field. Furthermore the exercises should deepen the attendees’ understanding of the basic principles of light transport and enable them to write a simple rendering program themselves.

These videos are the recordings of the lectures of 2015 at the Teschnische Universität Wien by Károly Zsolnai and Thomas Auzinger

Course website and slides → http://www.cg.tuwien.ac.at/courses/Rendering/
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