Photon-driven Irradiance Cache

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 many 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. Categories and Subject Descriptors (according to ACM CCS): I.3.7 [Computer Graphics]: Three-Dimensional Graphics and...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: CGF
• Authors: Jonathan Brouillat, Pascal Gautron, Kadi Bouatouch
• Keywords: CGF 2008, Global Illumination, Irradiance, Photon Mapping