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A practical algorithm for rendering interreflections with all-frequency BRDFs

Published: 07 February 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Algorithms for rendering interreflection (or indirect illumination) effects often make assumptions about the frequency range of the materials' reflectance properties. For example, methods based on Virtual Point Lights (VPLs) perform well for diffuse and semi-glossy materials but not so for highly glossy or specular materials; the situation is reversed for methods based on ray tracing. In this article, we present a practical algorithm for rendering interreflection effects with all-frequency BRDFs. Our method builds upon a spherical Gaussian representation of the BRDF, based on which a novel mathematical development of the interreflection equation is made. This allows us to efficiently compute one-bounce interreflection from a triangle to a shading point, by using an analytic formula combined with a piecewise linear approximation. We show through evaluation that this method is accurate for a wide range of BRDFs. We further introduce a hierarchical integration method to handle complex scenes (i.e., many triangles) with bounded errors. Finally, we have implemented the present algorithm on the GPU, achieving rendering performance ranging from near interactive to a few seconds per frame for various scenes with different complexity.

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Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Graphics
ACM Transactions on Graphics  Volume 33, Issue 1
January 2014
179 pages
ISSN:0730-0301
EISSN:1557-7368
DOI:10.1145/2577382
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 07 February 2014
Accepted: 01 September 2013
Revised: 01 September 2013
Received: 01 October 2012
Published in TOG Volume 33, Issue 1

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Author Tags

  1. Rendering
  2. all-frequency BRDFs
  3. global illumination
  4. interreflections
  5. spherical gaussian

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  • (2022)Neural Precomputed Radiance TransferComputer Graphics Forum10.1111/cgf.1448041:2(365-378)Online publication date: 24-May-2022
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