Scalable Realistic Rendering with Many-Light Methods

Carsten Dachsbacher, Jaroslav Křivánek, Miloš Hašan, Adam Arbree, Bruce Walter, and Jan Novák

Computer Graphics Forum (presented at EUROGRAPHICS 2013 - State of the Art Rep.), vol. 33, no. 1

We present a comprehensive overview of Many-Light rendering techniques covering topics such as generation of virtual lights (left), lighting with virtual lights (middle), clustering of virtual point lights (right), and applications to both high-quality and real-time rendering.

abstract

Recent years have seen increasing attention and significant progress in many-light rendering, a class of methods for the efficient computation of global illumination. The many-light formulation offers a unified mathematical framework for the problem reducing the full lighting transport simulation to the calculation of the direct illumination from many virtual light sources. These methods are unrivaled in their scalability: they are able to produce artifact-free images in a fraction of a second but also converge to the full solution over time. In this state-of-the-art report, we have three goals: give an easy-to-follow, introductory tutorial of many-light theory; provide a comprehensive, unified survey of the topic with a comparison of the main algorithms; and present a vision to motivate and guide future research. We will cover both the fundamental concepts as well as improvements, extensions, and applications of many-light rendering.

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bibtex

@article{Dachsbacher2014ManyLights,
    title       = {Scalable Realistic Rendering with Many-Light Methods},
    author      = {Dachsbacher, Carsten and K\v{r}iv\'{a}nek, Jaroslav and Ha\v{s}an, Milo\v{s} and Arbree, Adam and Walter, Bruce and Nov\'{a}k, Jan},
    journal     = {Computer Graphics Forum},
    volume      = {33},
    number      = {1},
    pages       = {88--104},
    year        = {2014},
    issn        = {1467-8659},
}