Interactive indirect illumination using voxel cone tracing: an insight

Indirect illumination is an important element for realistic image synthesis, but its computation is expensive and highly dependent on the complexity of the scene and of the BRDF of the surfaces involved. We present a novel algorithm to compute global illumination in real-time that avoids costly precomputation steps and is not restricted to low frequency illumination. It is based on a voxel octree representation and an approximate voxel cone tracing that allows a fast estimation of the visibility and incoming energy. Our approach can manage both Lambertian and Glossy materials at interactive framerates.

@Misc { CNSGE11c,
  author       = "Crassin, Cyril and Neyret, Fabrice and Sainz, Miguel and Green, Simon and Eisemann, Elmar",
  title        = "Interactive indirect illumination using voxel cone tracing: an insight",
  howpublished = "Technical Talk at SIGGRAPH",
  month        = "aug",
  year         = "2011",
  keywords     = "voxel, global illumination, indirect lighting, octree, gigavoxels",
  url          = "http://graphics.tudelft.nl/Publications-new/2011/CNSGE11c"
}