Ambient Light Caching via Approximate Photon Mapping
P. Makridis (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
M. van de Ruit (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
Elmar Eisemann (TU Delft - Computer Graphics and Visualisation)
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Abstract
Indirect illumination is an essential part of realistic computer-generated imagery. However, accurate calculation of indirect illumination comes at high compute costs. To this end, we replace lengthy indirect illumination paths by employing an ambient light cache based on photon mapping principles. By only performing cache queries after a certain path length has been reached, we show that significantly fewer photons than traditional photon mapping techniques are sufficient and that an inaccurate data structure can be used to store them. Despite these simplifications, our method generally outperforms unidirectional path tracing while adding little time overhead.