Efficient wavelet rotation for environment map rendering

Abstract

Real-time shading with environment maps requires the ability to rotate the global lighting to each surface point's local coordinate frame. Although extensive previous work has studied rotation of functions represented by spherical harmonics, little work has investigated efficient rotation of wavelets. Wavelets are superior at approximating high frequency signals such as detailed high dynamic range lighting and very shiny BRDFs, but present difficulties for interactive rendering due to the lack of an analytic solution for rotation. In this paper we present an efficient computational solution for wavelet rotation using precomputed matrices. Each matrix represents the linear transformation of source wavelet bases defined in the global coordinate frame to target wavelet bases defined in sampled local frames. Since wavelets have compact support, these matrices are very sparse, enabling efficient storage and fast computation at run-time. In this paper, we focus on the application of our technique to interactive environment map rendering. We show that using these matrices allows us to evaluate the integral of dynamic lighting with dynamic BRDFs at interactive rates, incorporating efficient non-linear approximation of both illumination and reflection. Our technique improves on previous work by eliminating the need for prefiltering environment maps, and is thus significantly faster for accurate rendering of dynamic environment lighting with high frequency reflection effects.