Parallel hierarchical radiosity: The PIT approach

Abstract

Radiosity is a method to compute the global illumination of a scene. To reduce its complexity, hierarchical radiosity decomposes the scene into a hierarchy of patches and computes the light exchanged between patches at different levels, according to their distance and/or to the amount of light they emit. A distributed memory implementation of this method has been developed through PIT, a problem independent library that supports hierarchical applications on distributed memory architectures. PIT functions exploit a distributed version of the tree representing the hierarchical decomposition. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.