Patent ID: 8866813
Filing Date: 2014-10-21
Classification: G06T

Abstract:
1. A computer-enabled method for shading a scene illuminated by indirect light, the scene comprising a sample location on a surface element of an object in the scene, the surface element lying at least partially within a camera viewing frustum of a virtual camera, the method comprising: generating a point cloud representation of the scene, wherein the point cloud representation of the scene is generated by dividing the surface of the object in the scene into one or more micropolygons and storing an energy value for each micropolygon into a point of one or more points in the point cloud; generating an importance map of the scene, based on the point cloud, wherein the importance map is generated by rasterizing the one or more points in the point cloud and designating an area of interest based on the energy values of the one or more points in the point cloud; biasing a ray tracing engine based on the importance map to calculate the path of a ray to the sample location to the area of interest; and shading the sample location using an output from the biased ray tracing engine.