Photon-driven Irradiance Cache

J. Brouillat, P. Gautron, K. Bouatouch
2008 Computer graphics forum (Print)  
We describe a global illumination method combining two well known techniques: photon mapping and irradiance caching. The photon mapping method has the advantage of being view independent but requires a costly additional rendering pass, called final gathering. As for irradiance caching, it is view-dependent, irradiance is only computed and cached on surfaces of the scene as viewed by a single camera. To compute records covering the entire scene, the irradiance caching method has to be run for
more » ... y cameras, which takes a long time and is a tedious task since the user has to place the needed cameras manually. Our method exploits the advantages of these two methods and avoids any intervention of the user. It computes a refined, view-independent irradiance cache from a photon map. The global illumination solution is then rendered interactively using radiance cache splatting.
doi:10.1111/j.1467-8659.2008.01346.x fatcat:4pun6d6uajb3nga7vqgqd26cai