View-dependent precomputed light transport using nonlinear Gaussian function approximations

  • Authors:
  • Paul Green;Jan Kautz;Wojciech Matusik;Frédo Durand

  • Affiliations:
  • Massachusetts Institute of Technology;Massachusetts Institute of Technology;Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratory (MERL);Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  • Venue:
  • I3D '06 Proceedings of the 2006 symposium on Interactive 3D graphics and games
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

We propose a real-time method for rendering rigid objects with complex view-dependent effects under distant all-frequency lighting. Existing precomputed light transport approaches can render rich global illumination effects, but high-frequency view-dependent effects such as sharp highlights remain a challenge. We introduce a new representation of the light transport operator based on sums of Gaussians. The nonlinear parameters of our representation enable 1) arbitrary bandwidth because scale is encoded as a direct parameter, and 2) high-quality interpolation across view and mesh triangles because we interpolate the mean direction of the Gaussians, thereby preventing linear cross-fading artifacts. However, fitting the precomputed light transport data to this new representation requires solving a nonlinear regression problem that is more involved than traditional linear and nonlinear (truncation) approximation techniques. We present a new data fitting method based on optimization that includes energy terms aimed at enforcing artifact-free interpolation. We demonstrate that our method achieves high visual quality with a small storage cost and an efficient rendering algorithm.