We propose a novel system for designing and manufacturing surfaces that produce desired caustic images when illuminated by a light source. Our system is based on a nonnegative image decomposition using a set of possibly overlapping anisotropic Gaussian kernels. We utilize this decomposition to construct an array of continuous surface patches, each of which focuses light onto one of the Gaussian...

In computer graphics, bright patterns of light focused onto matte surfaces are called “caustics”. We present a method for rendering dynamic scenes with moving caustics at interactive rates. This technique requires some simplifying assumptions about caustic behavior allowing us to consider it a local spatial property which we sample in a pre-processing stage. Storing the caustic locally limits c...

This paper presents a new technique for rendering caustics on non Lambertian surfaces The method is based on an extension of the photon map which removes previous restrictions limiting the usage to Lambertian surfaces We add information about the incoming direction to the photons and this allows us to combine the photon map with arbitrary re ectance functions Furthermore we introduce ba lancing...

Spectral rendering, or image synthesis utilizing the constituent wavelengths of white light, enables the rendering of iridescent colors caused by phenomena such as dispersion, diffraction, interference and scattering. Dispersion creates the rainbow of colors when white light shines through a prism. Caustics, the focusing and de-focusing of light through a refractive medium, can be interpreted a...

In the mid-morning on a sunny day one can sometimes see glare spots associated with uncolored "rainbow" (i.e., fold) caustics due to the sunlight reflected from the surface of dew or guttation drops. We show that these dewdrop reflection rainbows are due to places on the droplet (i.e., from an "inflection circle") where its Gaussian curvature becomes zero. We work out the theory of such caustic...

Despite its mathematical complexity, the multiple gravitational lens can be studied in detail in every situation where a perturbative approach is possible. In this paper, we examine the caustics of a system with a lens very far from the others with respect to their Einstein radii, and a system where mutual distances between lenses are small compared to the Einstein radius of the total mass. Fin...