Many LoDs: Parallel Many-View Rasterization for Efficient Global Illumination

Level-of-Details (LoD) structures are a key component for scalable rendering. Built from raw 3D data, these structures are often defined as Bounding Volume Hierarchies (BVH), providing coarse-to-fine adaptive approximations that are well-adapted for many-view rasterization. Here, the total number of pixels in each view is usually low, while the cost of choosing the appropriate LoD for each view is high. This task represents a challenge for existing GPU algorithms. We propose ManyLoDs, a new GPU algorithm to efficiently compute many LoDs from a BVH in parallel by balancing the workload within and among LoDs. Our approach is not specific to a particular rendering technique, can be used on lazy representations such as polygon soups, and can handle dynamic scenes. We apply our method to various many-view rasterization applications, including Instant Radiosity, Point-Based Global Illumination, and reflection/refraction mapping. For each of these, we achieve real-time performance in complex scenes at high resolutions.

@InProceedings { HREB11,
  author       = "Hollaender, Matthias and Ritschel, Tobias and Eisemann, Elmar and Boubekeur, Tamy",
  title        = "Many LoDs: Parallel Many-View Rasterization for Efficient Global Illumination",
  booktitle    = "Computer Graphics Forum (Proceedings of EGSR)",
  year         = "2011",
  url          = "http://graphics.tudelft.nl/Publications-new/2011/HREB11"
}