Real-time rendering with the first bounce of indirect lighting using Forward Light Cuts. The scene is composed of 7M triangles and is rendered in 16 ms at 1024x512 pixels resolution, without any precomputation and accounting for occluded yet contributing surfaces and long range light bounces.

Abstract

We present Forward Light Cuts, a novel approach to real-time global illumination using forward rendering techniques. We focus on unshadowed diffuse interactions for the first indirect light bounce in the context of large models such as the complex scenes usually encountered in CAD application scenarios. Our approach efficiently generates and uses a multiscale radiance cache by exploiting the geometry-specific stages of the graphics pipeline, namely the tessellator unit and the geometry shader. To do so, we assimilate virtual point lights to the scene's triangles and design a stochastic decimation process chained with a partitioning strategy that accounts for both close-by strong light reflections, and distant regions from which numerous virtual point lights collectively contribute strongly to the end pixel. Our probabilistic solution is supported by a mathematical analysis and a number of experiments covering a wide range of application scenarios. As a result, our algorithm requires no precomputation of any kind, is compatible with dynamic view points, lighting condition, geometry and materials, and scales to tens of millions of polygons on current graphics hardware.

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Related Work

See our research overview on PBGI and many-lights methods.

Bibtex

@article{LDDB:2016:FLC,
 author = {Gilles LAURENT and Cyril DELALANDRE and Gregoire De LA RIVIERE and Tamy BOUBEKEUR},
 title = {Forward Light Cuts: A Scalable Approach to Real-Time Global Illumination},
 journal = {Compurer Graphics Forum (Proc. EGSR 2016)},
 year = {2016},
 volume = {35},
 number = {4},
 pages = {79--88}
}