A two-pass solution to the rendering equation: A synthesis of ray tracing and radiosity methods

  • Authors:
  • John R. Wallace;Michael F. Cohen;Donald P. Greenberg

  • Affiliations:
  • Cornell Univ., Ithaca, NY;Cornell Univ., Ithaca, NY;Cornell Univ., Ithaca, NY

  • Venue:
  • SIGGRAPH '87 Proceedings of the 14th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques
  • Year:
  • 1987

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Abstract

View-independent and view-dependent image synthesis techniques, represented by radiosity and ray tracing, respectively, are discussed. View-dependent techniques are found to have advantages for calculating the specular component of illumination and view-independent techniques for the diffuse component. Based on these observations a methodology is presented for simulating global illumination within complex environments using a two-pass approach. The first pass is view-independent and is based on the hemi-cube radiosity algorithm, with extensions to include the effects of diffuse transmission, and specular to diffuse reflection and transmission. The second pass is view-dependent and is based on an alternative to distributed ray tracing in which a z-buffer algorithm is used to sample the intensities contributing to the specularly reflected or transmitted intensity.