Computer Graphics and Visualization • Publications

In Proceedings of I3D

Incrementally baked global illumination

Christan Luksch, Michael Wimmer, and Michael Schwärzler

Overview of the system baseline. A many-light solution is baked into a lightmap using shadow mapping and rasterization, providing complex diffuse GI independent from the view-point. Baked solutions typically require complete recalculations, interrupting a continuous work flow. Our proposed approach extends such a system by an efficient update mechanism performing an incremental transition to the new illumination state.

Global Illumination is affected by the slightest change in a 3D scene, requiring a complete reevaluation of the distributed light. In cases where real-time algorithms are not applicable due to high demands on the achievable accuracy, this recomputation from scratch results in artifacts like flickering or noise, disturbing the visual appearance and negatively affecting interactive lighting design workflows. We propose a novel system tackling this problem by providing incremental updates of a baked global illumination solution after scene modifications, and a re-convergence after a few seconds. Using specifically targeted incremental data structures and prioritization strategies in a many-light global illumination algorithm, we compute a differential update from one illumination state to another. We further demonstrate the use of a novel error balancing strategy making it possible to prioritize the illumination updates.

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Publisher Paper preprint

Citation

Christan Luksch, Michael Wimmer, and Michael Schwärzler, Incrementally baked global illumination, In Proceedings of I3D, pp. 4:1–4:10, 2019.

BibTex

@inproceedings{bib:luksch:2019,
    author       = { Luksch, Christan and Wimmer, Michael and Schwärzler, Michael },    
    title        = { Incrementally baked global illumination },
    booktitle    = { In Proceedings of I3D },
    year         = { 2019 },
    pages        = { 4:1--4:10 },
    doi          = { 10.1145/3306131.3317015 },
    dblp         = { conf/si3d/LukschWS19 },
    url          = { https://publications.graphics.tudelft.nl/papers/111 },
}