Underwater Scenes Illumination : Important Resources

Photon Mapping with participating media
Jensen's 1998 paper talks for the first time
Practical guide to global illumination using photon maps is brilliant to understand
I found a code for photon mapping with participating media here.






Miscellaneous

• This page describes a course project on realistic underwater lighting using photon mapping by Stanford students. Has a source code and sample scene too.
• This page by Mark Kilgard, talks about OpenGL-rendering of underwater caustics.

[EDIT: March 16, 2011]

[1]The FAQ for photon mapping implementation here and here are excellent.

[2]This source-code for photon mapping is a complete package. (including ray tracing pass).

[3]This source code is Jensen's photon mapping code. (with some little tweaks).

[4]This tutorial on photon mapping by Zack Waters is also excellent and is in the must-refer-to list.

[5]http://www.mpi-inf.mpg.de/departments/d4/teaching/ws200708/cg/rc/ko/

Downloadable and compilable ray tracing implementations available on the Internet

• Simple Ray tracer (uses Windows-specific headers; doesn't use acceleration structure; fast)
• RayTrace 3.3 (both platforms; organized code; uses kd-tree; supports .obj and .nff scenes (arbit scenes don't work))
  
• raytracer7 (really fast, uses kd-tree)
  
• ultimate ray tracer (haven't tried)
  
• heatRay (brilliant screenshots; haven't run the code yet)

3D Models Downloads available over the Web

• http://www.chromesphere.com/3dmodels.html
• http://www.3dm3.com/modelsbank/cat.htm
• http://people.sc.fsu.edu/~jburkardt/data/obj/obj.html
  (This page is an excellent page that summarizes everything pertinent to OBJ files)

[This list will be updated repeatedly.]