The growing demand for realistic renderings in both film and games has led to a number of proposed solutions to the Global Illumination problem. In order to imitate natural lighting, it is necessary to gather indirect illumination of the surrounding environment for lighting computations. This is a computationally expensive problem, requiring the sampling or rasterization of the hemisphere surrounding each ray intersection, to which there is no standardized solution. In this thesis we propose a new method of approximation using environment maps for caching radiance. The proposed method leverages a voxelized scene representation for storing direct illumination and a cache of environment maps for integrating indirect illumination. By using a voxelized scene to gather indirect lighting contributions and caching these contributions spatially, we are able to achieve fast and convincing renders of large complex scenes. The result of our implementation produces images comparable to those of existing Monte Carlo integration methods with render speeds a magnitude or more faster.

The object of this work is to create software implementing two algorithms for global ilumination computing. Iradiance and radiance caching should be implemented in CUDA framework on graphics card (GPU). Parallel implementation on GPU should dramatically improve algoritm speed compared to CPU implementation. The software will be written using already done framework for global illumunation computation. That allow to focus to algorithm implementation only. This work should speed up testing of new or existing methods for global illumination computing, because saving and reusing of intermediate results can be used for other algorithms too. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

The objective of this work is to create software implementing two algorithms for global ilumination computation. Iradiance and radiance caching should be implemented in CUDA framework on a graphics card (GPU). Parallel implementation on the GPU should improve algoritm speed compared to CPU implementation. The software will be written using an already done framework for global illumunation computation. That allows to focus on algorithm implementation only. This work should speed up testing of new or existing methods for global illumination computing, because saving and reusing of intermediate results can be used for other algorithms too. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

Simuler efficacement l'éclairage global est l'un des problèmes ouverts les plus importants en infographie. Calculer avec précision les effets de l'éclairage indirect, causés par des rebonds secondaires de la lumière sur des surfaces d'une scène 3D, est généralement un processus coûteux et souvent résolu en utilisant des algorithmes tels que le path tracing ou photon mapping. Ces techniquesrésolvent numériquement l'équation du rendu en utilisant un lancer de rayons Monte Carlo. Ward et al. ont proposé une technique nommée irradiance caching afin d'accélérer les techniques précédentes lors du calcul de la composante indirecte de l'éclairage global sur les surfaces diffuses. Krivanek a étendu l'approche de Ward et Heckbert pour traiter le cas plus complexe des surfaces spéculaires, en introduisant une approche nommée radiance caching. Jarosz et al. et Schwarzhaupt et al. ont proposé un modèle utilisant le hessien et l'information de visibilité pour raffiner le positionnement des points de la cache dans la scène, raffiner de manière significative la qualité et la performance des approches précédentes. Dans ce mémoire, nous avons étendu les approches introduites dans les travaux précédents au problème du radiance caching pour améliorer le positionnement des éléments de la cache. Nous avons aussi découvert un problème important négligé dans les travaux précédents en raison du choix des scènes de test. Nous avons fait une étude préliminaire sur ce problème et nous avons trouvé deux solutions potentielles qui méritent une recherche plus approfondie. / Efficiently simulating global illumination is one of the most important open problems in computer graphics. Accurately computing the effects of indirect illumination, caused by secondary bounces of light off surfaces in a 3D scene, is generally an expensive process and often solved using algorithms such as path tracing or photon mapping. These approaches numerically solve the rendering equation using stochastic Monte Carlo ray tracing. Ward et al. proposed irradiance caching to accelerate these techniques when computing the indirect illumination component on diffuse surfaces. Krivanek extended the approach of Ward and Heckbert to handle the more complex case of glossy surfaces, introducing an approach referred to as radiance caching. Jarosz et al. and Schwarzhaupt et al. proposed a more accurate visibility-aware Hessian-based model to greatly improve the placement of records in the scene for use in an irradiance caching context, significantly increasing the quality and performance of the baseline approach. In this thesis, we extended similar approaches introduced in these aforementioned work to the problem of radiance caching to improve the placement of records. We also discovered a crucial problem overlooked in the previous work due to the choice of test scenes. We did a preliminary study of this problem, and found several potential solutions worth further investigation.