Fast indirect illumination using Layered Depth Images

Abstract We present a novel hybrid rendering method for diffuse and glossy indirect illumination. A scene is rendered using standard rasterization on a GPU. In a shader, sec-ondary ray queries are used to sample incident light and to compute indirect lighting. We observe that it is more impor-tant to cast many rays than to have precise results for each ray. Thus, we approximate secondary rays by intersecting them with precomputed layered depth images of the scene. We achieve interactive to real-time frame rates including in-direct diffuse and glossy effects