Interactive global illumination in dynamic scenes

In this paper, we present a system for interactive computation of global illumination in dynamic scenes. Our system uses a novel scheme for caching the results of a high quality pixel-based renderer such as a bidirectional path tracer. The Shading Cache is an object-space hierarchical subdivision mesh with lazily computed shading values at its vertices. A high frame rate display is generated from the Shading Cache using hardware-based interpolation and texture mapping. An image space sampling scheme refines the Shading Cache in regions that have the most interpolation error or those that are most likely to be affected by object or camera motion.Our system handles dynamic scenes and moving light sources efficiently, providing useful feedback within a few seconds and high quality images within a few tens of seconds, without the need for any pre-computation. Our approach allows us to significantly outperform other interactive systems based on caching ray-tracing samples, especially in dynamic scenes. Based on our results, we believe that the Shading Cache will be an invaluable tool in lighting design and modelling while rendering.