A Framework for animation in global illumination environments

This paper proposes a framework for the production of animations of high quality radiosity environments which makes use of the a-priori knowledge of the dynamic properties of the scene in order to exploit temporal coherence. A discussion of the previous work leads to design a two-pass strategy that extends to the temporal dimension a related static method that computes a coarse global solution and then performs a final gathering step using hardware-graphics accelerators. The input data are a dynamic model of the environment through a period of time corresponding to the same camera recording. The strategy designed consists into two processes: a pre-processing stage and a production stage. The aim of the former one is to build a data structure able to store the eventual changes in the radiosity interactions throughout the sequence along with the predictable modifications in the image. The data structure is hierarchical so that maximum adaptability can be achieved in traversing it. The production stage computes all the frames by traversing the data structure and computing incrementally both the global and the local pass. A first implementation of the general framework is discussed along with future development lines