All-frequency relighting of glossy objects

  • Authors:
  • Rui Wang;John Tran;David Luebke

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA;University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA;University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA

  • Venue:
  • ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG)
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

We present a technique for interactive rendering of glossy objects in complex and dynamic lighting environments that captures interreflections and all-frequency shadows. Our system is based on precomputed radiance transfer and separable BRDF approximation. We factor glossy BRDFs using a separable decomposition and keep only a few low-order approximation terms, each consisting of a purely view-dependent and a purely light-dependent component. In the precomputation step, for every vertex, we sample its visibility and compute a direct illumination transport vector corresponding to each BRDF term. We use modern graphics hardware to accelerate this step and further compress the data using a nonlinear wavelet approximation. The direct illumination pass is followed by one or more interreflection passes, each of which gathers compressed transport vectors from the previous pass to produce global illumination transport vectors. To render at run time, we dynamically sample the lighting to produce a light vector, also represented in a wavelet basis. We compute the inner product of the light vector with the precomputed transport vectors, and the results are further combined with the BRDF view-dependent components to produce vertex colors. We describe acceleration of the rendering algorithm using programmable graphics hardware and discuss the limitations and trade-offs imposed by the hardware.