The Milton Project

Milton is an open source, global illumination rendering system which focuses on speed, extensibility, robustness, and physically accuracy. Milton will support a wide range of global illumination rendering algorithms, illumination models, sampling methods, filtering methods, and scene file formats. It will be usable as a stand-alone library (libmilton.a / milton.dll) as well as an executable with a fully-featured Qt GUI and a command-line UI.

Milton is actively being developed by Travis Fischer and Matthew Jacobs, undergraduates at Brown University, along with the guidance of the ever helpful and all around wonderful Spike (aka, Professor John Hughes).

Metropolis What?

Metropolis Light Transport (MLT) is an advanced offline rendering algorithm which uses a monte carlo random walk to efficiently produce an unbiased view of a 3D scene. MLT is especially good at handling notoriously hard-to-handle scenes that other rendering algorithms (photon mapping, rasterizers, etc) typically choke on. These difficult scenes are, however, not at all pathological and are in fact quite common in the world around us.

In our opinion, a physically-based renderer's performance and accuracy should be relatively independent of how light is propogated through a scene. That is, scenes with strong indirect illumination or scenes which are illuminated mainly through small crevices should not be inherently harder to render than the equivalent scenes with more prevalent direct lighting. This is one of MLT's main advantages over other global illumination algorithms; it is capable of producing an unbiased (mathematically correct on average) 2D image of a 3D scene. There are other unbiased rendering algorithms which exist (path tracing and bidirectional path tracing, for instance), but MLT is provably orders of magnitude more efficient than these alternatives. It is this reasoning which makes MLT such an important algorithm in computer graphics, even over a decade after Eric Veach and Leonidas Guibas applied the Metropolis algorithm to light transport in their seminal paper, Metropolis Light Transport (1997).

MLT Independent Study

This site is intended to act initially as a preliminary independent study proposal for Travis Fischer and Matt Jacobs for the Fall of 2008, and we intend to update it regularly throughout the semester with notes about our status, insights about MLT or Spike, etc.

Project Goals

Note: We've pointed out where our planned implementation and Pete/Taylor's work would differ so as to put our proposal in a context you're already familiar with.