(NOTE: The papers with ü is recommended for the class presentations.)

Monte Carlo Path Tracing

For an overview, see SIGGRAPH 2001 Course 29 Monte Carlo Path Tracing by Pat Hanrahan.

"The Rendering Equation" by J. T. Kajiya,  In Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 86, pages 143-150. 

"A Theoretical Framework for Physically Based Rendering" by E. P. Lafortune and Y. D. Willems.  Computer Graphics Forum 13, 2 (June 1994) pages 97-107.

If the above paper isn't available online, then please read his earlier work on Bi-Directional Path Tracing or Chapter 4 of his dissertation.

“Robust Monte Carlo Methods for Light Transport Simulation” Eric Veach, Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, December 1997.

ü Chapter 8: A Path Integral Formulation of Light Transport.

ü Chapter 9: Multiple Importance Sampling

ü Chapter 10: Bidirectional Path Tracing

"Metropolis Light Transport" by E. Veach and L. J. Guibas,  In Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 97, pages 65-76. (alternative link)

“A path space extension for robust light transport simulation” by Toshiya Hachisuka, Jacopo Pantaleoni, and Henrik Wann Jensen. ACM Trans. Graph. 31, 6, Article 191 (November 2012)

“Light transport simulation with vertex connection and merging” by Iliyan Georgiev, Jaroslav Křivánek, Tomáš Davidovič, and Philipp Slusallek. ACM Trans. Graph. 31, 6, Article 192 (November 2012).

Photon Mapping

ü "Global Illumination Using the Photon Maps" by H. W. Jensen,  In Rendering Techniques 96 (Proceedings of Eurographics Rendering Workshop 1996), pages 21-30.

“Progressive photon mapping” by T. Hachisuka, S. Ogaki, and H. W. Jensen, In ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2008 Papers.

“Stochastic Progressive Photon Mapping” by T. Hachisuka and H. W. Jensen. In ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2009 papers.

Primitives and Intersection Acceleration

ü “On building fast kd-trees for ray tracing, and on doing that in O(N log N)” by I. Wald and V. Havran. In Proceedings of the 2006 IEEE Symposium on Interactive Ray Tracing, pages 61–70, 2006.

 “On fast Construction of SAH based Bounding Volume Hierarchies” by Ingo Wald. Proceedings of the 2007 Eurographics/IEEE Symposium on Interactive Ray Tracing.dddd

  “Object partitioning considered harmful: space subdivision for BVHs” by Popov, S., R. Dimov, I. Georgiev, and P. Slusallek. In Proceedings of High Performance Graphics 2009, 15–22.

Camera Models

"Stochastic Sampling in Computer Graphics" by Robert L. Cook.  In ACM Transactions on Graphics, Volume 5, Issue 1 (Jan 1986), Pages 51-72.

“A realistic camera model for computer graphics” by Craig Kolb, Don Mitchell, and Pat Hanrahan. In Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 95, Pages 317-324.

Many Light Rendering

“Instant Radiosity” by Alexander Keller. In ACM SIGGRAPH 97.

“Reflective shadow maps” by Carsten Dachsbacher and Marc Stamminger. I3D 2005.

“Lightcuts - a scalable approach to illumination” by Bruce Walter, Sebastian Fernandez, Adam Arbree, Kavita Bala, Michael Donikian, and Donald P. Greenberg. In SIGGRAPH 2005.

Real-Time Global Illumination

“Real-time KD-tree construction on graphics hardware” by Kun Zhou, Qiming Hou, Rui Wang, and Baining Guo. In SIGGRAPH Asia 2008.

“SAH KD-tree construction on GPU” by Zhefeng Wu, Fukai Zhao, and Xinguo Liu. In Symposium on High Performance Graphics 2011 (HPG '11).