Synthesis of Multiresolution Scenes with Global Illumination on a GPU

Abstract

[Abstract] The radiosity computation has the important feature of producing view independent results, but these results are mesh dependent and, in consequence, are attached to a specific level of detail in the input mesh. Therefore, rendering at iterative frame rates would benefit from the utilization of multiresolution models. In this paper we focus on the rendering stage of a solution for hierarchical radiosity for multiresolution systems. This method is based on the application of an enriched hierarchical radiosity algorithm to an input scene with low resolution objects (represented by coarse meshes), and the efficient data management of the resulting values. The proposed encoding makes it possible to apply the color values obtained for the coarse objects to detailed versions of these objects during the rendering phase. These finer meshes are obtained by a standard mesh subdivision strategy, such as the Loop subdivision scheme. Our solution performs the whole rendering stage of this multiresolution approach on the GPU, implementing it in the geometry shader using Microsoft HLSL. Results of our implementation show an important reduction in computational costs.