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PantaRay: fast ray-traced occlusion caching of massive scenes

Published:26 July 2010Publication History
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Abstract

We describe the architecture of a novel system for precomputing sparse directional occlusion caches. These caches are used for accelerating a fast cinematic lighting pipeline that works in the spherical harmonics domain. The system was used as a primary lighting technology in the movie Avatar, and is able to efficiently handle massive scenes of unprecedented complexity through the use of a flexible, stream-based geometry processing architecture, a novel out-of-core algorithm for creating efficient ray tracing acceleration structures, and a novel out-of-core GPU ray tracing algorithm for the computation of directional occlusion and spherical integrals at arbitrary points.

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          cover image ACM Transactions on Graphics
          ACM Transactions on Graphics  Volume 29, Issue 4
          July 2010
          942 pages
          ISSN:0730-0301
          EISSN:1557-7368
          DOI:10.1145/1778765
          Issue’s Table of Contents

          Copyright © 2010 ACM

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          Publication History

          • Published: 26 July 2010
          Published in tog Volume 29, Issue 4

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