An approach to point based approximate color bleeding with volumes

Abstract

Achieving realistic or believable global illumination in scenes with participating media is expensive. Light interacts with the particles of a volume, creating complex radiance patterns. This paper introduces an explicit extension to the commonly used point-based color bleeding technique which allows fast, believable in- and out-scattering effects building on existing data structures and paradigms. The proposed method achieves results comparable to that of existing Monte Carlo integration methods, that is realistic looking renders of scenes which include volume data elements, obtaining render speeds between 10 and 36 times faster while keeping memory overhead under 5%. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.