Grid based final gather for radiosity on complex clustered scenes

Abstract

Radiosity methods handle large scenes and complex objects using clustering techniques. To reconstruct a high quality image, usually a second very time consuming final gather pass is applied which exactly recomputes the last light transport before reaching the eye. We propose a new final gather technique which is especially suited for scenes with fine polygonal geometry. In such scenes, substantial parts of the incident illumination vary only smoothly across the surfaces and can be reconstructed on a much coarser structure. We therefore propose a final gather reconstruction based on an object-independent 3D grid. The illumination of each sender is investigated separately: If it varies smoothly across a grid cell, it is interpolated between the vertices of the grid cell, or recomputed exactly, otherwise. We further reduce the number of required samples using view-dependent optimizations. So complex objects with a very detailed structure - plants are good example here - exhibit strong masking effects, which can be exploited by our method. Finally, the estimation of penumbra screen sizes can be used to further reduce costly visibility reevaluations.