«Pre-calculated Volumetric Illumination for Real-time Graphics»

Abstract. Real-time rendering can benefit from global illumination methods to make the three-dimensional scenes look more convincing and lifelike. On the other hand, the conventional global illumination algorithms make heave usage of intra- and inter-object visibility calculations, so they are very time consuming, and using them in real-time graphics is prohibitive. Modern illumination approximations, such as ambient occlusion variants, use pre-calculated data to reduce the problem to a local shading one. This thesis presents an alternative method for the pre-calculation and fast real-time exploitation of visibility information in order to produce a visually pleasant ambient occlusion and lighting approximation. Unlike other methods, ours does not use directional data. Therefore, it is a fast algorithm for real-time graphics that works well for both complex and simple geometry and uses a comparatively small amount of memory storage. The proposed algorithm can be used to illuminate arbitrary convex or concave surfaces and poses n