A team of scientists from Aalto University is about to reveal a new technique for computing real-time lighting effects.
Ari Silvennoinen, a PhD candidate in computer science and Jaakko Lehtinen, an associate professor of computer science and scientist at NVIDIA, will show the new approach at the ACM’s SIGGRAPH Asia 2017 conference in Bangkok this week.
Real-time dynamic global illumination remains a big challenge in the field. The challenge stems from the fact that, given a scene, any two points in the scene could be in interaction by participating in the light transport from one another.
The number of these interactions grows very rapidly. For example, with just 1,000 points, we have potentially 1,000,000 interactions.
The new technique accurately simulates indirect lighting using a small number of “radiance probes.” The approach is said to effectively operate in real-time on 3D scenes, at the level of complexity seen in current game scenes.
The quality of the results, in particular the indirect shadows, is very high due to the accurate way we handle visibility between senders and receivers. Our method makes high-quality indirect illumination, the Holy Grail in real-time computer graphics, practically viable.