Precomputed radiance transfer for real-time rendering in dynamic, low-frequency lighting environments

We present a new, real-time method for rendering diffuse and glossy objects in low-frequency lighting environments that captures soft shadows, interreflections, and caustics. As a preprocess, a novel global transport simulator creates functions over the object's surface representing transfer of arbitrary, low-frequency incident lighting into transferred radiance which includes global effects like shadows and interreflections from the object onto itself. At run-time, these transfer functions are applied to actual incident lighting. Dynamic, local lighting is handled by sampling it close to the object every frame; the object can also be rigidly rotated with respect to the lighting and vice versa. Lighting and transfer functions are represented using low-order spherical harmonics. This avoids aliasing and evaluates efficiently on graphics hardware by reducing the shading integral to a dot product of 9 to 25 element vectors for diffuse receivers. Glossy objects are handled using matr...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2002
• Where: TOG
• Authors: Peter-Pike J. Sloan, Jan Kautz, John Snyder
• Keywords: Glossy Objects, Lighting, Soft Shadows, TOG 2002