Real-time global illumination for dynamic scenes

Abstract

Global illumination is an important factor in creating realistic scenes and provides visual cues for understanding scene geometry. However, global illumination is very costly and only recently has it become viable to render scenes with global-illumination effects at interactive frame rates by exploiting the parallelism and programmability of modern GPUs.This course provides a concise overview of recent GPU-based global-illumination techniques that support fully dynamic scenes, compares them, and discusses their various strengths and weaknesses. After introducing the necessary foundation (rendering equation, direct vs. indirect illumination, etc.), the course summarizes the three main streams of real-time global illumination techniques: virtual point lights, screen-space techniques, and hierarchical finite elements.