Practical global illumination for interactive particle visualization

Particle-based simulation methods are used to model a wide range of complex phenomena and to solve time-dependent problems of various scales. Effective visualizations of the resulting state will communicate subtle changes in the three-dimensional structure, spatial organization, and qualitative trends within a simulation as it evolves. We present two algorithms targeting upcoming, highly parallel multicore desktop systems to enable interactive navigation and exploration of large particle datasets with global illumination effects. Monte Carlo path tracing and texture mapping are used to capture computationally expensive illumination effects such as soft shadows and diffuse interreflection. The first approach is based on precomputation of luminance textures and removes expensive illumination calculations from the interactive rendering pipeline. The second approach is based on dynamic luminance texture generation and decouples interactive rendering from the computation of global illumina...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: CG
• Authors: Christiaan P. Gribble, Carson Brownlee, Steven G. Parker
• Keywords: CG 2008, Computer Graphics, Expensive Illumination, Global Illumination Effects, Luminance Texture