Radiance Caching for Efficient Global Illumination Computation

Authors
: Jaroslav Køivánek, Pascal Gautron, Sumanta Pattanaik, Kadi
Bouatouch


Abstract
:
In this paper we present a ray tracing based method for accelerated global illumination computation in scenes with low-frequency glossy BRDFs. The method is based on sparse sampling, caching, and interpolating radiance on glossy surfaces. In particular we extend the irradiance caching scheme proposed by Ward et al. in 1988 to cache and interpolate directional incoming radiance instead of irradiance. The incoming radiance at a point is represented by a vector of coefficients with respect to a spherical or hemispherical basis. The surfaces suitable for interpolation are selected automatically according to the roughness of their BRDF. We also propose a novel method for computing translational radiance gradient at a point.

 

IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics paper

 

AVI video

 

Example C++ code