Modular Radiance Transfer

Bradford Loos, Lakulish Antani, Kenny Mitchell, Derek Nowrouzezahrai, Wojciech Jarosz, Peter-Pike Sloan
ACM Transactions on Graphics - Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH Asia (2011)

Abstract

Many rendering algorithms willingly sacrifice accuracy, favoring plausible shading with high-performance. We present Modular Radiance Transfer (MRT), an approach for smooth, approximate direct-to-indirect transfer that scales from high-end GPUs to low-end mobile platforms. MRT eliminates scene-dependent precomputation by storing compact transport on simple shapes, akin to bounce cards used in film production. These shapes’ modular transport can be instanced, warped and connected on-the-fly to yield approximate light transport in large scenes. We introduce a prior on incident lighting distributions and perform all computations in low-dimensional subspaces. An extit{implicit lighting environment} induced from the low-rank approximations is in turn used to model secondary effects, such as volumetric transport variation, higher-order irradiance, and transport through lightfields. MRT is a new approach to precomputed lighting that uses a novel low-dimensional subspace simulation of light transport to uniquely balance the need for high-performance and portable solutions, low memory usage, and fast authoring iteration.

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BIBTEX

@article{loos11modular,
author = {Bradford J. Loos and Lakulish Antani and Kenny Mitchell and Derek Nowrouzezahrai and Wojciech Jarosz and Peter-Pike Sloan},
title = {Modular Radiance Transfer},
journal = {ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2011)},
volume = {30},
number = {6},
year = {2011},
month = dec,
}
© Derek Nowrouzezahrai 2005 - 2012