State of the Art in Global Illumination for Interactive Applications and High‐quality Animations

Abstract

Global illumination algorithms are regarded as computationally intensive. This cost is a practical problem when producing animations or when interactions with complex models are required. Several algorithms have been proposed to address this issue. Roughly, two families of methods can be distinguished. The first one aims at providing interactive feedback for lighting design applications. The second one gives higher priority to the quality of results, and therefore relies on offline computations. Recently, impressive advances have been made in both categories. In this report, we present a survey and classification of the most up-to-date of these methods.

Interactive selection of optimal fenestration materials for schematic architectural daylighting design

“…Alternative methods to radiosity exist for modeling indirect lighting such as irradiance caching, which progressively samples and interpolates scene irradiance values [34,35,36]. A more complete summary of recent advances for both interactive and offline global illumination can be found in [37].…”

Temporal radiance caching

“…We also describe several methods aiming at computing approximate solutions at interactive frame rates. A thorough description of many existing methods can be found in [4]. Most significant algorithms for global illumination computation are detailed in [10], [11].…”

“…Instead of representing the incoming radiance change with respect to translation and rotation, those gradients represent how the incoming radiance gets altered over time. In the context of irradiance caching, (4) shows that the irradiance at point p is estimated using rotation and translation gradients. The temporal irradiance gradient of record K at a given point p with normal n is derived from (4) as…”

“…Many approaches for such computation have been proposed in the last 20 years. Most of these methods are based on radiosity, such as those in [1], [2], [3], and [4]. However, radiosity methods are prone to visual artifacts due to undersampling or high memory consumption and computational cost due to high-quality sampling.…”

Accelerating animation through verification of shooting walks

“…This approach is promising if multiple images of the same scene are needed, typically in case of animation [17]. Naturally, we would have to calculate the image for every frame of animation using the information from pre-processing and the rendering of previous frames to the maximum extent possible [3]. In order to achieve this, there are three major problems to be resolved.…”