Efficient Glossy Global Illumination with Interactive Viewing

The ability to perform interactive walkthroughs of global illumination solutions including glossy effects is a challenging open problem. In this paper we overcome certain limitations of previous approaches. We first introduce a novel, memory- and compute-efficient representation of incoming illumination, in the context of a hierarchical radiance clustering algorithm. We then represent outgoing radiance with an adaptive hierarchical basis, in a manner suitable for interactive display. Using appropriate refinement and display strategies, we achieve walkthroughs of glossy solutions at interactive rates for non-trivial scenes. In addition, our implementation has been developed to be portable and easily adaptable as an extension to existing, diffuse-only, hierarchical radiosity systems. We present results of the implementation of glossy global illumination in two independent global illumination systems.

@InProceedings{SSGPDS99,
  author       = "Stamminger, Marc and Scheel, Annette and Granier, Xavier and Perez-Cazorla, Frederic and Drettakis, George and Sillion, Fran\c{c}ois",
  title        = "Efficient Glossy Global Illumination with Interactive Viewing",
  booktitle    = "Proceedings of Graphics Interface",
  pages        = "50--57",
  month        = "June",
  year         = "1999",
  keywords     = "global illumination, glossy reflection, interactive viewing",
  url          = "http://www-sop.inria.fr/reves/Basilic/1999/SSGPDS99"
}