Lightcuts: a scalable approach to illumination

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Lightcuts: a scalable approach to illumination (2005)

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by Bruce Walter , Sebastian Fernandez , Adam Arbree , Kavita Bala , Michael Donikian , Donald P. Greenberg

Venue:	ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proc. SIGGRAPH
Citations:	107 - 17 self

BibTeX

@ARTICLE{Walter05lightcuts:a,
    author = {Bruce Walter and Sebastian Fernandez and Adam Arbree and Kavita Bala and Michael Donikian and Donald P. Greenberg},
    title = {Lightcuts: a scalable approach to illumination},
    journal = {ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proc. SIGGRAPH},
    year = {2005}
}

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Abstract

Lightcuts is a scalable framework for computing realistic illumination. It handles arbitrary geometry, non-diffuse materials, and illumination from a wide variety of sources including point lights, area lights, HDR environment maps, sun/sky models, and indirect illumination. At its core is a new algorithm for accurately approximating illumination from many point lights with a strongly sublinear cost. We show how a group of lights can be cheaply approximated while bounding the maximum approximation error. A binary light tree and perceptual metric are then used to adaptively partition the lights into groups to control the error vs. cost tradeoff. We also introduce reconstruction cuts that exploit spatial coherence to accelerate the generation of anti-aliased images with complex illumination. Results are demonstrated for five complex scenes and show that lightcuts can accurately approximate hundreds of thousands of point lights using only a few hundred shadow rays. Reconstruction cuts can reduce the number of shadow rays to tens.

Keyphrases

scalable approach point light reconstruction cut shadow ray binary light tree error v complex scene area light non-diffuse material anti-aliased image sun sky model maximum approximation error arbitrary geometry indirect illumination cost tradeoff sublinear cost many point light spatial coherence complex illumination new algorithm wide variety scalable framework hdr environment map realistic illumination

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