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Real-time global illumination by precomputed local reconstruction from sparse radiance probes

Published: 20 November 2017 Publication History

Abstract

We present a direct-to-indirect transport technique that enables accurate real-time rendering of indirect illumination in mostly static scenes of complexity on par with modern games while supporting fully dynamic lights, cameras and diffuse surface materials. Our key contribution is an algorithm for reconstructing the incident radiance field from a sparse set of local samples --- radiance probes --- by incorporating mutual visibility into the reconstruction filter. To compute global illumination, we factorize the direct-to-indirect transport operator into global and local parts, sample the global transport with sparse radiance probes at real-time, and use the sampled radiance field as input to our precomputed local reconstruction operator to obtain indirect radiance. In contrast to previous methods aiming to encode the global direct-to-indirect transport operator, our precomputed data is local in the sense that it needs no long-range interactions between probes and receivers, and every receiver depends only on a small, constant number of nearby radiance probes, aiding compression, storage, and iterative workflows. While not as accurate, we demonstrate that our method can also be used for rendering indirect illumination on glossy surfaces, and approximating global illumination in scenes with large-scale dynamic geometry.

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    cover image ACM Transactions on Graphics
    ACM Transactions on Graphics  Volume 36, Issue 6
    December 2017
    973 pages
    ISSN:0730-0301
    EISSN:1557-7368
    DOI:10.1145/3130800
    Issue’s Table of Contents
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Publication History

    Published: 20 November 2017
    Published in TOG Volume 36, Issue 6

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    Author Tags

    1. global illumination
    2. real-time rendering

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