Implicit visibility and antiradiance for interactive global illumination

Abstract

We reformulate the rendering equation to alleviate the need for explicit visibility computation, thus enabling interactive global illumination on graphics hardware. This is achieved by treating visibility implicitly and propagating an additional quantity, called antiradiance, to compensate for light transmitted extraneously. Our new algorithm shifts visibility computation to simple local iterations by maintaining additional directional antiradiance information with samples in the scene. It is easy to parallelize on a GPU. By correctly treating discretization and filtering, we can compute indirect illumination in scenes with dynamic objects much faster than traditional methods. Our results show interactive update of indirect illumination with moving characters and lights.

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Index Terms

• Computing methodologies

  • Artificial intelligence

    • Computer vision

      • Computer vision tasks

  • Computer graphics

    • Graphics systems and interfaces

      • Graphics processors

• Human-centered computing

  • Human computer interaction (HCI)

    • Interaction devices

      • Graphics input devices

• Theory of computation

  • Randomness, geometry and discrete structures

    • Computational geometry