Title
Lightcuts: a scalable approach to illumination
Abstract
Lightcuts is a scalable framework for computing realistic illumination. It handles arbitrary geometry, non-diffuse materials, and illumination from a wide variety of sources including point lights, area lights, HDR environment maps, sun/sky models, and indirect illumination. At its core is a new algorithm for accurately approximating illumination from many point lights with a strongly sublinear cost. We show how a group of lights can be cheaply approximated while bounding the maximum approximation error. A binary light tree and perceptual metric are then used to adaptively partition the lights into groups to control the error vs. cost tradeoff.We also introduce reconstruction cuts that exploit spatial coherence to accelerate the generation of anti-aliased images with complex illumination. Results are demonstrated for five complex scenes and show that lightcuts can accurately approximate hundreds of thousands of point lights using only a few hundred shadow rays. Reconstruction cuts can reduce the number of shadow rays to tens.
Year
DOI
Venue
2005
10.1145/1186822.1073318
ACM Trans. Graph.
Keywords
Field
DocType
raytracing,approximation error
Computer vision,Shadow,Computer graphics (images),Computer science,Ray tracing (graphics),Sky,Artificial intelligence,Global illumination,Approximation error,Bounding overwatch,Scalability,Binary number
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
24
3
0730-0301
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
158
6.06
26
Authors
6
Search Limit
100158
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Bruce Walter11484105.07
Sebastian Fernandez229719.84
Adam Arbree367443.35
Kavita Bala42046138.75
Michael Donikian51737.23
Donald P. Greenberg648841568.57