Patent ID: 9305324
Filing Date: 2016-04-05
CPC Classification: G06T

Claim Text:
1. A method, comprising: identifying a plurality of photons associated with at least one scene; identifying a plurality of screen-space tiles associated with the at least one scene; for each of the photons: (a) determining which of the plurality of screen-space tiles would contain a projection of an effect sphere of the photon, (b) storing a copy of, or a pointer to, the photon in a bucket corresponding to each of the determined screen-space tiles, and (c) for each of the screen-space tiles, culling the photon when the photon does not intersect a depth range of the scene within the screen-space tile, wherein (a)-(c) results in each of the screen-space tiles having a corresponding bucket with one or more photons therein; after performing (a)-(c) for each of the photons, selecting at least a subset of photons within each bucket from which to compute shading for the corresponding screen-space tile; and computing shading for the at least one scene by shading pixels within each screen-space tile utilizing the one or more photons selected from the corresponding bucket.