: Left: Real-time global illumination on a static 2.3M triangle scene. Both the light and the viewpoint can be moved freely at 7-21 frames per second after a little less than half an hour of precomputation on a single PC. Right: The indirect illumination expressed in our meshless hierarchical basis (emphasized for visualization). Green dots represent non-zero coefficients. We introduce a meshless hierarchical representation for solving light transport problems. Precomputed radiance transfer (PRT) and finite elements require a discrete representation of illumination over the scene. Non-hierarchical approaches such as per-vertex values are simple to implement, but lead to long precomputation. Hierarchical bases like wavelets lead to dramatic acceleration, but in their basic form they work well only on flat or smooth surfaces. We introduce a hierarchical function basis induced by scattered data approximation. It is decoupled from the geometric representation, allowing the hierarchical representation of illumination on complex objects. We present simple data structures and algorithms for constructing and evaluating the basis functions. Due to its hierarchical nature, our representation adapts to the complexity of the illumination, and can be queried at different scales. We demonstrate the power of the new basis in a novel precomputed direct-to-indirect light transport algorithm that greatly increases the complexity of scenes that can be handled by PRT approaches.
Later, in REF ) a meshless hierarchical representation of the objects in the scene, built upon a hierarchy of points, is performed.
A meshless hierarchical representation for light transport
SIGGRAPH '08
Computer Science