UC San Diego computer scientists have created a fog and smoke machine for computer graphics that cuts the computational cost of making realistic smoky and foggy 3-D images, such as beams of light from a lighthouse piercing thick fog.

By cutting the computing cost for creating highly realistic imagery from scratch, the UCSD computer scientists are helping to pull cutting edge graphics techniques out of research labs and into movies and eventually video games and beyond. The findings are being presented this week at Europe’s premier computer graphics conference, Eurographics 2008 in Crete, Greece on April 17.

This new work is part of a shift in the computer graphics, film, animation and video game industries toward greater realism through the use of “ray tracing algorithms.” Much of the realism in ray tracing technologies comes from calculating how the light in computer generated images would behave if it were set loose in the real world and followed the laws of nature.

At the heart of the new UCSD advance are computationally slimmed “photon mapping” algorithms, which are a subset of the ray tracing algorithms. The computer scientists found a way to collect all of the pertinent lighting information in computer generated scenes at once, which made the new photon mapping approach more lightweight than conventional photon mapping. This technique is especially good for creating smoky, foggy or cloudy scenes and producing images that do not have much unwanted visual noise.

“We took an algorithm that is already great and made it more efficient,” said Wojciech Jarosz, the first author on the new Eurographics paper and a Ph.D. candidate from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at UCSD’s Jacobs School of Engineering.Smoke Detector Alarm/ smoke alarm / fire alarm