Rasterization hardware provides interactive frame rates for rendering dynamic scenes, but lacks the ability of ray tracing required for efficient global illumination simulation. Existing ray tracing based methods yield high quality renderings but are far too slow for interactive use. We present a new parallel global illumination algorithm that perfectly scales, has minimal preprocessing and communication overhead, applies highly efficient sampling techniques based on randomized quasi-Monte Carlo integration, and benefits from a fast parallel ray tracing implementation by shooting coherent groups of rays. Thus a performance is achieved that allows for applying arbitrary changes to the scene, while simulating global illumination including shadows from area light sources, indirect illumination, specular effects, and caustics at interactive frame rates. Ceasing interaction rapidly provides high quality renderings.

The addition of global illumination can dramatically increase the realism achievable when rendering virtual environments.

Interactive rendering often requires the use of simplified shading algorithms with reduced illumination fidelity. Higher quality

In this paper we introduce a new perceptual metric for efficient, high quality, global illumination rendering. The metric is based on a rendering-by-components framework in which the direct, and indirect diffuse, glossy, and specular light transport paths are separately computed and then composited to produce an image. The metric predicts the perceptual importances of the computationally expensive indirect illumination components with respect to image quality. To develop the metric we conducted a series of psychophysical experiments in which we measured and modeled the perceptual importances of the components. An important property of this new metric is that it predicts component importances from inexpensive estimates of the reflectance properties of a scene, and therefore adds negligible overhead to the rendering process. This perceptual metric should enable the development of an important new class of efficient global-illumination rendering systems that can intelligently allocate limited computational resources, to provide high quality images at interactive rates.

We propose an adaptive form of frameless rendering with the potential to dramatically increase rendering speed over conventional interactive rendering approaches. Without the rigid sampling patterns of framed renderers, sampling and reconstruction can adapt with very fine granularity to spatio-temporal color change. A sampler uses closed-loop feedback to guide sampling toward edges or motion in the image. Temporally deep buffers store all the samples created over a short time interval for use in reconstruction and as sampler feedback. GPU-based reconstruction responds both to sampling density and space-time color gradients. Where the displayed scene is static, spatial color change dominates and older samples are given significant weight in reconstruction, resulting in sharper and eventually antialiased images. Where the scene is dynamic, more recent samples are emphasized, resulting in less sharp but more up-to-date images. We also use sample reprojection to improve reconstruction and guide sampling toward occlusion edges, undersampled regions, and specular highlights. In simulation our frameless renderer requires an order of magnitude fewer samples than traditional rendering of similar visual quality (as measured by RMS error), while introducing overhead amounting to 15 % of computation time.

Producing high quality animations featuring rich object appearance and compelling lighting effects is very time consuming using traditional frame-by-frame rendering systems. In this paper we present a rendering architecture for computing multiple frames at once by exploiting the coherencebetween image samples in the temporal domain.

this paper we introduce a new approach to realistic rendering at interactive rates on commodity graphics hardware. The approach uses efficient perceptual metrics within a decision theoretic framework to optimally order rendering operations, producing images of the highest visual quality within system constraints. We demonstrate the usefulness of this approach for various applications such as diffuse texture caching, environment map prioritization and radiosity mesh simplification. Although here we address the problem of realistic rendering at interactive rates, the perceptually-based decision theoretic methodology we introduce can be usefully applied in many areas of computer graphics

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. ACM CSS: I.3.7 Computer Graphics—Three-Dimensional Graphics and Realism 1.

One of the main obstacles to the use of global illumination in image synthesis industry is the considerable amount of time needed to compute the lighting for a single image. Until now, this computational cost has prevented its widespread use in interactive design applications as well as in computer animations. Several algorithms have been proposed to address these issues. In this report, we present a much needed survey and classification of the most up-to-date of these methods. Roughly, two families of algorithms 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. Indeed, with the steady progress of computing resources and graphics hardware, and the current trend of new algorithms for animated scenes, common use of global illumination seems closer than ever.

We present a system for computing plausible global illumination solution for dynamic environments in real time on programmable graphics processors (GPUs). We designed a progressive global illumination algorithm to simulate multiple bounces of light on the surfaces of synthetic scenes. The entire algorithm runs on ATI’s Radeon 9800 using vertex and fragment shaders, and computes global illumination solution for reasonably complex scenes with moving objects and moving lights in realtime.