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ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2008
 
Imperfect Shadow Maps for Efficient
Computation of Indirect Illumination
 
         
  Tobias Ritschel Thorsten Grosch Min H. Kim  
  Hans-Peter Seidel Carsten Dachsbacher Jan Kautz  
         
  MPI Informatik Universität Stuttgart University College London  
         
  SIGGRAPH Logo  
  Global illumination for a completely dynamic scene (light, view, geometry, material) rendered at 19 fps on an NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX. The scene is illuminated with a small spot light (upper right); all other illumination and shadowing is indirect (one bounce).  
   
  Abstract
   
  We present a method for interactive computation of indirect illu- mination in large and fully dynamic scenes based on approximate visibility queries. While the high-frequency nature of direct lighting requires accurate visibility, indirect illumination mostly consists of smooth gradations, which tend to mask errors due to incorrect visibility. We exploit this by approximating visibility for indirect illumination with imperfect shadow maps—low-resolution shadow maps rendered from a crude point-based representation of the scene. These are used in conjunction with a global illumination algorithm based on virtual point lights enabling indirect illumination of dy- namic scenes at real-time frame rates. We demonstrate that imperfect shadow maps are a valid approximation to visibility, which makes the simulation of global illumination an order of magnitude faster than using accurate visibility.
   
  BibTeX
 
@Article{Ritschel:2008:SIGA,
author = {Tobias Ritschel and Thorsten Grosch and Min H. Kim and Hans-Peter Seidel and Carsten Dachsbacher and Jan Kautz},
title = {Imperfect Shadow Maps for Efficient Computation of Indirect Illumination},
journal = {ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proc. SIGGRAPH Asia 2008)},
year = {2008},
volume = {27},
number = {5},
pages = {129:1--8},
doi = "1409060.1409082",
URL = "http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1409060.1409082"
}
   
   
   
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