Caustics are crucial in water rendering, yet they are often neglected in real-time applications due to the demanding computational requirements of the general-purpose caustics computation methods. In this paper we present a two-pass algorithm for caustics computation that is extremely fast and produces high-quality results. Our algorithm is targeted for commonly used height field representations of water and a planar caustic-receiving surface. The underlying theory of our approach is presented along with implementation details and pseudo codes. Springer-Verlag 2009.
