Abstract

Level-of-Details (LoD) structures are a key component for scalable rendering. Built from raw 3D data, these structures are often defined as Bounding Volume Hierarchies (BVH), providing coarse-to-fine adaptive approximations that are well-adapted for many-view rasterization. Here, the total number of pixels in each view is usually low, while the cost of choosing the appropriate LoD for each view is high. This task represents a challenge for existing GPU algorithms. We propose ManyLoDs, a new GPU algorithm to efficiently compute many LoDs from a BVH in parallel by balancing the workload within and among LoDs. Our approach is not specific to a particular rendering technique, can be used on lazy representations such as polygon soups, and can handle dynamic scenes. We apply our method to various many-view rasterization applications, including Instant Radiosity, Point-Based Global Illumination, and reflection/refraction mapping. For each of these, we achieve real-time performance in complex scenes at high resolutions.

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Related Work

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

BibTex Reference:

@article{Hollander:2011:ManyLoDs,
author = {Matthias Holländer and Tobias Ritschel and Elmar Eisemann and Tamy Boubekeur},
title = {ManyLoDs: Parallel Many-View Level-of-Detail Selection for Real-Time Global Illumination},
journal ={Computer Graphics Forum (Proc. EGSR 2011)},
year = {2011},
volume = {30},
number = {4},
pages = {1233--1240},
}