"Bidirectional
Instant
Radiosity" [project
page]
This paper presents a new sampling strategy to achieve interactive
global
illumination on one commodity computer. The goal is to propose an
efficient
numerical stochastic scheme which can be well adapted to a fast
rendering
algorithm. As we want to provide an efficient sampling strategy to
handle
difficult settings without sacrificing performance in common cases, we
developed an extension of Instant Radiosity in the
same way bidirectional path tracing is an extension of path or light
tracing.
Our idea is to build several estimators and to efficiently combine them
to
find a set of virtual point light sources which are relevant for the
areas of
the scene seen by the camera. The resulting algorithm is faster than
classical solutions to global illumination. Using today graphics
hardware, an
interactive frame rate and the convergence of the scheme can be easily
obtained in scenes with many light sources, glossy materials or
difficult
visibility problems.