GemstoneFire: adaptive dispersive ray tracing of polyhedrons

Synthesizing realistic images of gemstones requires techniques beyond the scope of normal ray tracing. The fire of such highly refractive objects is what makes gemstones attractive, and also imposes very high computational overhead to perform time consuming dispersive ray tracing. Gemstones are usually cut in polyhdrons as for example, a brillant cut. After a detailed analysis of the nature of dispersive ray tracing of polyhedral objects, we propose here a new method of using three simple rays adaptively to model the ray spreading caused by dispersive refraction. It is shown that the proposed method reduces the computational complexity to an order close to that of normal ray tracing.