Incrementally Baked Global Illumination

Global Illumination is affected by the slightest change in a 3D scene, requiring a complete reevaluation of the distributed light. In cases where real-time algorithms are not applicable due to high demands on the achievable accuracy, this recomputation from scratch results in artifacts like flickering or noise, disturbing the visual appearance and negatively affecting interactive lighting design workflows. We propose a novel system tackling this problem by providing incremental updates of a baked global illumination solution after scene modifications, and a re-convergence after a few seconds. Using specifically targeted incremental data structures and prioritization strategies in a many-light global illumination algorithm, we compute a differential update from one illumination state to another. We further demonstrate the use of a novel error balancing strategy making it possible to prioritize the illumination updates.

@InProceedings { LWS19,
  author       = "Luksch, Christan and Wimmer, Michael and Schw{\"a}rzler, Michael",
  title        = "Incrementally Baked Global Illumination",
  booktitle    = "Proceedings of the 33rd Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games",
  series       = "I3D, 2019",
  month        = "May",
  year         = "2019",
  editor       = "Blenkhorn, Ari Rapkin",
  publisher    = "ACM, New York",
  note         = "DOI=10.1145/3306131.3317015, URL=https://www.vrvis.at/publications/PB-VRVis-2019-006/",
  keywords     = "Global Illumination, Instant Radiosity, Lightmaps",
  url          = "http://graphics.tudelft.nl/Publications-new/2019/LWS19"
}