Lightmap

Abstract: Irradiance normal mapping is a method to combine two popular techniques, light mapping and normal mapping, and is used in games such as Half-Life 2 or Halo 3. This combination allows using low-resolution light caching on surfaces with only a few coefficients which are evaluated by normal maps to render spatial high-frequency changes in the lighting. Though there are dedicated bases for this purpose such as the Half-Life 2 basis, higher order basis functions such as quadratic Spherical Harmonics are needed for an accurate representation. However, a full spherical basis is not needed since the irradiance is stored on the surface of a scene.In order to represent the irradiance signals efficiently, we propose a novel polynomial, hemispherically orthonormal basis function set that is specifically designed to carry a directional irradiance signal on the hemisphere and which makes optimal use of the number of coefficients. To compare our results with previous work, we analyze the relations and attributes of previously proposed basis systems and show that 6 coefficients are sufficient to accurately represent an irradiance signal on the hemisphere. To create the necessary irradiance signals, we use Spherical Harmonics as an intermediate basis due to their fast filtering capabilities.

Abstract: Lighting large outdoor scenes continues to present a challenge for realtime rendering. While techniques such as Parallel Split Shadow Maps [Zhang 2006] work well for a subset of the view frustum they fail to account for all shadowing in an outdoor scene. Lightmaps are often used as a fallback but require a unique UV parameterization and do not provide occlusion for moving objects. With deferred rendering the additional gbuffer overhead for unique parameterizations presents a challenge as well, making it costly to maintain the lightmap machinery in a modern pipeline.

Abstract: Dynamic soft shadows may be generated without resorting to computationally-expensive multiple render passes and sampling, or lightmap generation. With disclosed systems and methods, a dynamic soft shadow may be rendered in a single pass, which is sufficiently efficient to run on an untethered virtual reality (VR) device, such as a head mounted device (HMD). Despite the efficiency, the shadow quality may be markedly superior to those generated with other methods. In some embodiments, a script may be used with a shader to render a shadow having a realistic size, shape, position, fading factor and sharpness, based on a position and size of a shadow casting element and a light vector.

Abstract: Computer graphics can nowadays produce images in realtime that are hard to distinguish from photos of a real scene. One of the most important aspects to achieve this is the interaction of light with materials in the virtual scene. The lighting computation can be separated in two different parts. The first part is concerned with the direct illumination that is applied to all surfaces lit by a light source; algorithms related to this have been greatly improved over the last decades and together with the improvements of the graphics hardware can now produce realistic effects. The second aspect is about the indirect illumination which describes the multiple reflections of light from each surface. In reality, light that hits a surface is never fully absorbed, but instead reflected back into the scene. And even this reflected light is then reflected again and again until its energy is depleted. These multiple reflections make indirect illumination very computationally expensive. The first problem regarding indirect illumination is therefore, how it can be simplified to compute it faster. Another question concerning indirect illumination is, where to compute it. It can either be computed in the fixed image that is created when rendering the scene or it can be stored in a light map. The drawback of the first approach is, that the results need to be recomputed for every frame in which the camera changed. The second approach, on the other hand, is already used for a long time. Once a static scene has been set up, the lighting situation is computed regardless of the time it takes and the result is then stored into a light map. This is a texture atlas for the scene in which each surface point in the virtual scene has exactly one surface point in the 2D texture atlas. When displaying the scene with this approach, the indirect illumination does not need to be recomputed, but is simply sampled from the light map. The main contribution of this thesis is the development of a technique that computes the indirect illumination solution for a scene at interactive rates and stores the result into a light atlas for visualizing it. To achieve this, we overcome two main obstacles. First, we need to be able to quickly project data from any given camera configuration into the parts of the texture that are currently used for visualizing the 3D scene. Since our approach for computing and storing indirect illumination requires a huge amount of these projections, it needs to be as fast as possible. Therefore, we introduce a technique that does this projection entirely on the graphics card with a single draw call. Second, the reflections of light into the scene need to be computed quickly. There-