PantaRay

Jacopo Pantaleoni, Luca Fascione, Martin Hill, Timo Aila
2010 ACM Transactions on Graphics  
Figure 1 : The geometric complexity of scenes rendered in the movie Avatar often exceeds a billion polygons and varies widely: distant rocks and vegetation are tessellated to a level of meters and centimeters, while the faces of even distant characters are modeled to over 40,000 polygons from forehead to chin. The spatial resolution of occlusion caches precomputed by our system also spans several orders of magnitude. Abstract We describe the architecture of a novel system for precomputing
more » ... directional occlusion caches. These caches are used for accelerating a fast cinematic lighting pipeline that works in the spherical harmonics domain. The system was used as a primary lighting technology in the movie Avatar, and is able to efficiently handle massive scenes of unprecedented complexity through the use of a flexible, stream-based geometry processing architecture, a novel out-of-core algorithm for creating efficient ray tracing acceleration structures, and a novel out-of-core GPU ray tracing algorithm for the computation of directional occlusion and spherical integrals at arbitrary points.
doi:10.1145/1778765.1778774 fatcat:6mgrerfus5hpdiaiasaiaeucea