Implementation Results and Analysis of a Parallel Progressive Radiosity

The quality of synthetic images depends, first, on the quality of the modelling of the three-dimensional scenes to visualize; more numerous are the geometrical and optical details, more realistic are the resulting images. Unfortunately, such scene descriptions need a big amount of memory, as well as a long time of computation. In order to deal with these restrictions, we propose a parallel implementation for an extended stochastic progressive radiosity method, where form factors are computed with a ray tracing scheme, on a network of processors with a distributed memory and a message passing mechanism. Our program has already treated very big scenes (more than one million patches for example). Keywords: Image Synthesis, Realistic Rendering, Progressive Radiosity, Parallelism, MIMD, Multi-Threading. 1 Introduction Image synthesis is decomposed in two parts. First, the modelling step describes the geometrical and optical properties of the scene to be rendered. By geometrical descriptio..