Interactive Global Illumination Using Implicit Visibility

Rendering global illumination effects for dynamic scenes at interactive frame rates is a computationally challenging task. Much of the computation time needed is spent during visibility queries between individual scene elements, and it is almost illusive to update this information at real-time even for moderately complex scenes. In this paper, we propose a global illumination approach for dynamic scenes that runs at near-real-time frame rates on a single PC. Our method is inspired by the principles of hierarchical radiosity and tackles the visibility problem by implicitly evaluating mutual visibility while constructing a hierarchical link structure between scene elements. By means of the same efficient and easy-to-implementframework, we are able to reproduce a large variety of complex lighting effects for moderately sized scenes, such as intersections, environment map lighting as well as area light sources.