Rendering antialiased shadows with depth maps
SIGGRAPH '87 Proceedings of the 14th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques
PixelFlow: high-speed rendering using image composition
SIGGRAPH '92 Proceedings of the 19th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques
Fast shadows and lighting effects using texture mapping
SIGGRAPH '92 Proceedings of the 19th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques
A Sorting Classification of Parallel Rendering
IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications
Scalable distributed visualization using off-the-shelf components
PVGS '99 Proceedings of the 1999 IEEE symposium on Parallel visualization and graphics
Proceedings of the 27th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques
Lightning-2: a high-performance display subsystem for PC clusters
Proceedings of the 28th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques
Scalable interactive volume rendering using off-the-shelf components
PVG '01 Proceedings of the IEEE 2001 symposium on parallel and large-data visualization and graphics
Shadow algorithms for computer graphics
SIGGRAPH '77 Proceedings of the 4th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques
Casting curved shadows on curved surfaces
SIGGRAPH '78 Proceedings of the 5th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques
Real-time appearance preserving out-of-core rendering with shadows
EGSR'04 Proceedings of the Fifteenth Eurographics conference on Rendering Techniques
| Hi-index | 0.00 |
Recently several distributed rendering systems have been developed that exploit a cluster of commodity computers by connecting host graphics cards over a fast network to form a compositing pipeline. This paper introduces an algorithm for one such system to parallelize contributions from arbitrary numbers of OpenGL lights, for example to compute approximate soft shadows by sampling area light sources. The algorithm renders multiple shadow maps across nodes of the cluster by factoring the OpenGL lighting equation into illumination and material properties. Additional parallelism is achieved by utilizing multiple texture units within each graphics card. Illumination by L point sources can be rendered by (L/K) + 1 nodes where K is the number of texture units on each graphics card. For walkthrough applications each node requires a single rendering pass, while for scenes with dynamic lights or geometry K+ 1 passes are needed per node. We present results using fragment shaders on nVidia Ge- Force4 Ti4600 and ATI Radeon 8500 graphics cards, and a cycle-accurate simulation of the compositing operators. These results show interactive frame rates for walkthroughs and dynamic models rendering shadows with 32 light sources on 9 nodes of a Sepia-2a distributed rendering cluster.