next up previous
Next: Introduction

Caching Secondary Rays for Fast Approximation of Diffuse Global Illumination

Lawrence Kesteloot

Abstract:

This paper describes a better calculation of the ambient term for ray-traced diffuse surfaces. This is done by ray-tracing the whole scene from each intersection point over a hemisphere and averaging the resulting image to estimate the ambient term. Since the ambient term is most useful for first-generation rays, only simple path-tracing is used for rays of second and later generations. In addition, since first-generation rays' intersections with objects have a good amount of locality, previous data is used to optimize the hemisphere calculation at each pixel.





Lawrence Kesteloot
Fri Jan 20 16:24:55 EST 1995