Novel illumination algorithms for off-line and real-time rendering

This thesis presents new and efficient illumination algorithms for off-line and real-time rendering. The realistic rendering of arbitrary indirect illumination is a difficult task. Assuming ray optics model of light, the rendering equation describes the propagation of light in the scene with high accuracy. However, the computation is expensive, and thus even in off-line rendering, i.e., in prerendered animations, indirect illumination is often approximated as it would otherwise constitute a bottleneck in the production pipeline. Indirect illumination can be computed using Monte Carlo integration, but when restrained to a reasonable amount of computation time, the result is often corrupted by noise. This thesis includes a method that effectively reduces the noise by applying a spatially varying filter to the noisy illumination. For real-time performance, some components of indirect illumination can be precomputed. Irradiance volume and many variations of it precompute reflections and shadowing of a static scene into a volumetric data structure. This data is then used to shade dynamic objects in real-time. The practical usage of the method is limited due to aliasing artifacts. This thesis shows that with a suitable super-sampling approach, a significant quality improvement can be obtained. Another direction is to precompute how light propagates in the scene and use the precomputed data during run-time to solve both direct and indirect illumination based on the known incident lighting. To keep the memory and precomputation costs tractable, these methods are typically restricted to infinitely distant lighting. Those that are not, require a very long precomputation time. This thesis presents an algorithm that adopts a wavelet-based hierarchical finite element method for the precomputation. A significant performance improvement over the existing techniques is obtained. When full global illumination cannot be afforded, ambient occlusion is an attractive alternative. This thesis includes two methods for real-time rendering of ambient occlusion in dynamic scenes. The first method models the shadowing of ambient light between rigid moving bodies. The second method gives a data-oriented solution for rendering approximate ambient occlusion for animated characters in real-time. Both methods achieve unprecedented efficiency.reviewe