Modular Radiance Transfer

  • Authors:
  • Bradford J. Loos;Lakulish Antani;Kenny Mitchell;Derek Nowrouzezahrai;Wojciech Jarosz;Peter-Pike Sloan

  • Affiliations:
  • Disney Interactive Studios and University of Utah;Disney Interactive Studios and UNC Chapel Hill;Disney Interactive Studios;Disney Research Zurich;Disney Research Zurich;Disney Interactive Studios

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2011 SIGGRAPH Asia Conference
  • Year:
  • 2011

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Many rendering algorithms willingly sacrifice accuracy, favoring plausible shading with high-performance. Modular Radiance Transfer (MRT) models coarse-scale, distant indirect lighting effects in scene geometry that scales from high-end GPUs to low-end mobile platforms. MRT eliminates scene-dependent precomputation by storing compact transport on simple shapes, akin to bounce cards used in film production. These shapes' modular transport can be instanced, warped and connected on-the-fly to yield approximate light transport in large scenes. We introduce a prior on incident lighting distributions and perform all computations in low-dimensional subspaces. An implicit lighting environment induced from the low-rank approximations is in turn used to model secondary effects, such as volumetric transport variation, higher-order irradiance, and transport through lightfields. MRT is a new approach to precomputed lighting that uses a novel low-dimensional subspace simulation of light transport to uniquely balance the need for high-performance and portable solutions, low memory usage, and fast authoring iteration.