Open Access Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington
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Interactive Generation of Path-Traced Lightmaps

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Version 2 2023-09-22, 02:15
Version 1 2021-12-08, 01:56
thesis
posted on 2023-09-22, 02:15 authored by Roughton, Thomas

Indirect illumination is an important part of realistic images, and accurately simulating the complex effects of indirect illumination in real-time applications has long been a challenge for the industry. One popular approach is to use offline precomputed solutions such as lightmaps (textures containing the precomputed lighting in a scene) to efficiently approximate these effects. Unfortunately, these offline solutions have historically enforced long iteration times that come at a cost to artist productivity. These solutions have additionally either supported only the low-frequency diffuse component of indirect lighting, yielding poor visual results for glossy or metallic materials, or have used overly expensive approximations.  In recent years, the state of the art lightmap precomputation pipeline has shifted to using highly vectorised path tracing, often on GPU hardware, to compute the indirect illumination effects. The use of path tracing enables progressive rendering, wherein an approximation to the full solution is found and then refined as opposed to solving for the final result in a single step. Progressive rendering through path tracing thereby helps to provide rapid iteration for artists.  This thesis describes a system that can progressively path-trace indirect illumination lightmaps on the GPU.Contributing to this system, itintroduces a new gather-based method for sample accumulation, enhances algorithms from prior work, and presents a range of encoding methods, including a novel progressive method for non-negative least-squares encoding of spherical basis functions.  In addition, it presents a novel, efficient solution for high-quality precomputed diffuse and low-frequency specular indirect illumination that extends the Ambient Dice family of spherical basis functions. This solution provides comparable or better specular reconstruction to prior work at lower runtime cost and has potential for widespread use in real-time applications.

History

Copyright Date

2019-01-01

Date of Award

2019-01-01

Publisher

Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington

Rights License

CC BY-ND 4.0

Degree Discipline

Computer Graphics

Degree Grantor

Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington

Degree Level

Masters

Degree Name

Master of Science

ANZSRC Type Of Activity code

1 PURE BASIC RESEARCH

Victoria University of Wellington Item Type

Awarded Research Masters Thesis

Language

en_NZ

Victoria University of Wellington School

School of Engineering and Computer Science

Advisors

Rhee, Taehyun; Chalmers, Andrew