Production volume rendering: SIGGRAPH 2017 course

This document might be out of date, please check online for an updated version. With significant advances in techniques, along with increasing computational power, path tracing has now become the predominant rendering method used in movie production. Thanks to these advances, volume rendering can now take full advantage of the path tracing revolution, allowing the creation of photoreal images that would not have been feasible only a few years ago. However, volume rendering also provides its own set of unique challenges that can be daunting to path tracer developers and researchers accustomed to dealing only with surfaces. While recent texts and materials have covered some of these challenges, to the best of our knowledge none have comprehensively done so, especially when confronted with the complexity and scale demands required by production. For example, the last volume rendering course at SIGGRAPH in 2011 discussed ray marching and precomputed lighting and shadowing, none of which are techniques advisable for production purposes in 2017.