Practical global illumination with irradiance caching

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Practical global illumination with irradiance caching

Irradiance caching is a ray tracing-based technique for computing global illumination on diffuse surfaces. Specifically, it addresses the computation of indirect illumination bouncing off one diffuse object onto another. The sole purpose of irradiance caching is to make this computation reasonably fast. The main idea is to perform the indirect illumination sampling only at a selected set of locations in the scene, store the results in a cache, and reuse the cached value at other points through fast interpolation. This book is for anyone interested in making a production-ready implementation of irradiance caching that reliably renders artifact-free images. Since its invention 20 years ago, the irradiance caching algorithm has been successfully used to accelerate global illumination computation in the Radiance lighting simulation system. Its widespread use had to wait until computers became fast enough to consider global illumination in film production rendering.^

Since then, its use is ubiquitous. Virtually all commercial and open-source rendering software base the global illumination computation upon irradiance caching. Although elegant and powerful, the algorithm in its basic form often fails to produce artifact-free images. Unfortunately, practical information on implementing the algorithm is scarce. The main objective of this book is to expose the irradiance caching algorithm along with all the details and tricks upon which the success of its practical implementation is dependent. In addition, we discuss some extensions of the basic algorithm, such as a GPU implementation for interactive global illumination computation and temporal caching that exploits temporal coherence to suppress flickering in animations. Our goal is to expose the material without being overly theoretical. However, the reader should have some basic understanding of rendering concepts, ray tracing in particular.^

Familiarity with global illumination is useful but not necessary to read this book.

Publish Date
Language
English

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Edition Availability
Cover of: Practical global illumination with irradiance caching
Practical global illumination with irradiance caching
2009, Morgan & Claypool Publishers
electronic resource / in English

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Book Details


Table of Contents

Introduction to ray tracing and global illumination
Basic radiometric quantities
Rendering goal: find radiance
Ray tracing
Shading, reflectance, and the BRDF
Direct and indirect illumination
Direct illumination
Indirect illumination
Illumination integral and rendering equation
Illumination integral
Lambertian reflection
Rendering equation
Irradiance caching core
Indirect irradiance calculation
Irradiance gradients
Irradiance caching algorithm
Interpolation
Distance to surfaces, Ri
Creating an irradiance record: summary
Data structure
Single-reference octree
Multiple-reference octree
Last query reuse
Irradiance caching summary
Practical rendering with irradiance caching
Single-pass vs. two-pass image rendering
Scanline order
Hierarchical refinement and best candidate pattern
Two-pass rendering
Handling complexity
Ray tracing simplified geometry
Bump mapping
Displacement mapping
^
Fur, hair & grass
Motion blur
Ambient occlusion caching
Irradiance caching in a complete global illumination solution
Path grammar
Illumination components
Smooth diffuse indirect illumination
Ideal specular reflection
Direct illumination
Glossy indirect illumination
Recursion
Multiple indirect bounces using path tracing
Multiple indirect bounces using recursive irradiance caching
Multiple indirect bounces using photon mapping
Irradiance caching on graphics hardware
Irradiance splatting
Cache miss detection
GPU-based record generation
Hemisphere sampling on the GPU
Irradiance computation
Irradiance gradient computation
Global illumination rendering
Results
High quality rendering
Interactive global illumination
Conclusion
Temporal irradiance caching
Overview of temporal irradiance caching
Temporal weighting function
Temporal gradients
Estimating future irradiance E [t0 +1]
GPU implementation
^
^^
Results
Conclusion
A: mathematical foundations
A.1: (Hemi)spheres: care and feeding
A.1.1: spherical coordinates
A.1.2: direction
A.1.3: solid angle
A.1.4: differential solid angle
A.1.5: spherical integration
A.2: continuous random variables in a nutshell
A.2.1: random variables and probability density functions
A.2.2: expected value and variance
A.3: Monte Carlo integration in a nutshell
A.3.1: Monte Carlo estimators
A.3.2: importance sampling: a variance reduction technique
B: derivation of gradient formulas
B.1: rotation gradient derivation
B.2: translation gradient derivation
C: split-sphere model
D: annotated references
D.1: primary sources
D.2: further reading on irradiance caching
D.3: background on global illumination.
^^

Edition Notes

Part of: Synthesis digital library of engineering and computer science.

Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on April 7, 2009).

Series from website.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 125-128) and index.

Abstract freely available; full-text restricted to subscribers or individual document purchasers.

Also available in print.

Mode of access: World Wide Web.

System requirements: Adobe Acrobat reader.

Published in
San Rafael, Calif. (1537 Fourth Street, San Rafael, CA 94901 USA)
Series
Synthesis lectures on computer graphics and animation -- # 10
Other Titles
Synthesis digital library of engineering and computer science.

Classifications

Dewey Decimal Class
621.367
Library of Congress
TA1637 .K756 2009

The Physical Object

Format
[electronic resource] /

Edition Identifiers

Open Library
OL25549462M
ISBN 13
9781598296457, 9781598296440

Work Identifiers

Work ID
OL16948956W

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February 25, 2022 Edited by ImportBot import existing book
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