Exploring the use of glossy light volumes for interactive global illumination

Abstract

From the literature, it is known that backward polygon beam tracing and other light volume methods are well suited to gather path coherency from specular scattering surfaces. This is of course useful for modelling and efficiently simulating caustics (LS+DE paths). This paper generalises backward polygon beam tracing to also model glossy scattering surfaces. To this end the details of a backward polygon beam tracing model and implementation of source-to-glossy-to-diffuse light transport (LG+DE) paths are researched.