Technical section: Memory efficient light baking

Authors:
Henry SchäFer;Jochen SüíMuth;Cornelia Denk;Marc Stamminger
Affiliations:
Computer Graphics Group, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany;Computer Graphics Group, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany;Realtime Technology AG, Munich, Germany;Computer Graphics Group, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany
Venue:
Computers and Graphics
Year:
2012

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Abstract

In real-time rendering, global lighting information that is too expensive to be computed on the fly is typically pre-computed and baked as vertex attributes or into textures. Prominent examples are view independent effects, such as ambient occlusion, shadows, indirect lighting, or radiance transfer coefficients. Vertex baking usually requires less memory, but exhibits artifacts on large triangles. These artifacts are avoided by baking lighting information into textures, but at the expense of significant memory consumption and additional work to obtain a parameterization. In this paper, we propose a memory efficient and performant hybrid approach that combines texture- and vertex-based baking. Cheap vertex baking is applied by default and textures are used only where vertex baking is insufficient to represent the signal. Seams at transitions between both representations are hidden using a simple shader which smoothly blends between vertex- and texture-based shading. With our fully automatic approach, we can significantly reduce memory requirements without negative impact on rendering quality or performance.