Parallel and adaptive visibility sampling for rendering dynamic scenes with spatially varying reflectance

• Published in: Computers & graphics Vol. 38; pp. 374 - 381
• Main Authors: Wang, Rui, Pan, Minghao, Han, Xiang, Chen, Weifeng, Bao, Hujun
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier Ltd 01.02.2014
• Subjects: Adaptive visibility sampling; Algorithms; Dynamic scenes; Dynamics; Environmental lighting; Illumination; Reflectance; Rendering; Sampling; Visibility; Visibility maps; Adaptive visibility sampling; Dynamic scenes; Environmental lighting
• ISSN: 0097-8493; 1873-7684
• DOI: 10.1016/j.cag.2013.10.036

Fast rendering of dynamic scenes with natural illumination, all-frequency shadows and spatially varying reflections is important but challenging. One main difficulty brought by moving objects is that the runtime visibility update of dynamic occlusion is usually time-consuming and slow. In this paper, we present a new visibility sampling technique and show that efficient all-frequency rendering of dynamic scenes can be achieved by sampling visibility of dynamic objects in an adaptive and parallel way. First, we propose a two-level adaptive sampling scheme to distribute sample points spatially and compute visibility maps angularly on each sample point. Then, we present a parallel hemispherical distance transform to convert these visibility maps into spherical signed distance fields. Finally, using such a distance-based visibility representation, we integrate our visibility sampling algorithm in the all-frequency rendering framework for scenes with spatially varying BRDFs. With an entire GPU-based implementation, our algorithm enables interactive all-frequency rendering of moderate dynamic scenes with environment lighting and spatially varying reflectance. Parallel and adaptive visibility sampling for rendering dynamic scenes with spatially-varying reflectance. [Display omitted] •We present a new rendering method for all-frequency relighting of dynamic scenes with environment lighting and spatially varying reflectance.•A two-level adaptive sampling scheme to efficiently distribute visibility samples spatially and angularly.•A parallel hemispherical distance transformation algorithm to convert visibility maps into spherical signed distance fields.•Interactive rendering on moderate dynamic scenes with an entire GPU-based implementation of the algorithm.