Adaptive mesh subdivision for efficient light baking

Abstract

Light baking has long been a popular technique for real-time rendering. It usually precomputes and bakes the global lighting effects as vertex attributes or textures. Vertex baking requires less memory but can cause artifacts for large triangles. Texture baking can avoid this and generate a high-quality visual effect in real-time rendering. However, it requires significant memory consumption, which may limit the real-time performance and usage. To address this problem, we propose an adaptive mesh subdivision algorithm for memory-efficient light baking, including a fast triangle subdivision level determination method and an optimized solution to calculate vertex colors. Only the subdivided mesh is required during the real-time rendering. Therefore, memory requirements can be significantly reduced while keeping the visual effect. Besides, the subdivision level is allowed to be intuitively controlled by users with a specified parameter. Our algorithm can be easily implemented on commodity graphics hardware and integrated in existing real-time applications such as online preview systems.