Temporal Sampling for Real-Time Global Illumination

Abstract

Photorealism in real-time rendering is a topic of recent interest due to technological advances of the graphics processing units. The light transport and in particular the diffuse light reflections are some of the most important components of photorealism in computer graphics. In this paper, we present an improvement of an instant radiosity approach which simulates the diffuse reflections of the light by sampling a set of virtual point lights from multi-view renderings of the scene. Our proposed method obtains the VPLs from a sequence of frames, instead of sampling the results from a single frame. It uses a very small number of samples per frame that are combined with the results obtained from the samples evaluated in the previous frames. This strategy offers a performance improvement of up to 3 times with similar visual results.