Global Illumination for Interactive Lighting Design Using Light Path Pre-Computation and Hierarchical Histogram Estimation

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a fast global illumination solution for interactive lighting design. Using our method, light sources and the viewpoint are movable, and the characteristics of materials can be modified (assuming low-frequency BRDF) during rendering. Our solution is based on particle tracing (a variation of photon mapping) and final gathering. We assume that objects in the input scene are static, and pre-compute potential light paths for particle tracing and final gathering. To perform final gathering fast, we propose an efficient technique called Hierarchical Histogram Estimation for rapid estimation of radiances from the distribution of the particles. The rendering process of our method can be fully implemented on the GPU and our method achieves interactive frame rates for rendering scenes with even more than 100,000 triangles.