Cascaded light propagation volumes for real-time indirect illumination

Abstract

This paper introduces a new scalable technique for approximating indirect illumination in fully dynamic scenes for real-time applications, such as video games. We use lattices and spherical harmonics to represent the spatial and angular distribution of light in the scene. Our technique does not require any precomputation and handles large scenes with nested lattices. It is primarily targeted at rendering single-bounce indirect illumination with occlusion, but can be extended to handle multiple bounces and participating media. We demonstrate that our method produces plausible results even when running on current game console hardware with a budget of only a few milliseconds for performing all computation steps for indirect lighting. We evaluate our technique and show it in combination with a variety of popular real-time rendering techniques.