Jaroslav Křivánek

Scalable Realistic Rendering with Many-Light Methods


Carsten Dachsbacher
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
 
Jaroslav Křivánek
Charles University, Prague
Fac. of Math. and Physics
Miloš Hašan
UC Berkeley
 
Adam Arbree
Autodesk, Inc.
 
Bruce Walter
Cornell University
 
Jan Novák
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
 


Many-light rendering methods, covered in this report, yield good results at different points along the quality-speed trade-off axis.


Abstract

Recent years have seen increasing attention and significant progress in many-light rendering, a class of methods for the efficient computation of global illumination. The many-light formulation offers a unified mathematical framework for the problem reducing the full lighting transport simulation to the calculation of the direct illumination from many virtual light sources. These methods are unrivaled in their scalability: they are able to produce artifact-free images in a fraction of a second but also converge to the full solution over time. In this state-of-the-art report, we have three goals: give an easy-to-follow, introductory tutorial of many-light theory; provide a comprehensive, unified survey of the topic with a comparison of the main algorithms; and present a vision to motivate and guide future research. We will cover both the fundamental concepts as well as improvements, extensions, and applications of many-light rendering.


Publication

Carsten Dachsbacher, Jaroslav Křivánek, Miloš Hašan, Adam Arbree, Bruce Walter, and Jan Novák. Scalable Realistic Rendering with Many-Light Methods. Computer Graphics Forum, 33(1), pp. 88–104, February 2014 (also published as EUROGRAPHICS State of the Art Report, 2013). ... DOI  |  BibTeX


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Acknowledgments

This work was partially supported by the Intel Visual Computing Institute in Saarbrücken/Germany, the DFG grant DA 1200/1-1, and the Czech Science Foundation grant P202-13-26189S.