We present a method for interactive computation of indirect illumination in large and fully dynamic scenes based on approximate visibility queries. While the high-frequency nature of direct lighting requires accurate visibility, indirect illumination mostly consists of smooth gradations, which tend to mask errors due to incorrect visibility. We exploit this by approximating visibility for indirect illumination with imperfect shadow maps—low-resolution shadow maps rendered from a crude point-based representation of the scene. These are used in conjunction with a global illumination algorithm based on virtual point lights enabling indirect illumination of dynamic scenes at real-time frame rates. We demonstrate that imperfect shadow maps are a valid approximation to visibility, which makes the simulation of global illumination an order of magnitude faster than using accurate visibility.

Shadow computation in dynamic scenes under complex illumination is a challenging problem. Methods based on precomputation provide accurate, real-time solutions, but are hard to extend to dynamic scenes. Specialized approaches for soft shadows can deal with dynamic objects but are not fast enough to handle more than one light source. In this paper, we present a technique for rendering dynamic objects under arbitrary environment illumination, which does not require any precomputation. The key ingredient is a fast, approximate technique for computing soft shadows, which achieves several hundred frames per second for a single light source. This allows for approximating environment illumination with a sparse collection of area light sources and yields real-time frame rates.

Rendering high-quality shadows in real-time is a challenging problem. Shadow mapping has proved to be an efficient solution, as it scales well for complex scenes. However, it suffers from aliasing problems. Filtering the shadow map alleviates aliasing, but unfortunately, native hardware-accelerated filtering cannot be applied, as the shadow test has to take place beforehand. We introduce a simple approach to shadow map filtering, by approximating the shadow test using an exponential function. This enables us to pre-filter the shadow map, which in turn allows for high quality hardware-accelerated filtering. Compared to previous filtering techniques, our technique is faster, consumes less memory and produces less artifacts.

Interactive rendering of global illumination effects is a challenging problem. While precomputed radiance transfer (PRT) is able to render such effects in real time the geometry is generally assumed static. This work proposes to replace the precomputed lighting response used in PRT by precomputed depth. Precomputing depth has the same cost as precomputing visibility, but allows visibility tests for moving objects at runtime using simple shadow mapping. For this purpose, a compression scheme for a high number of coherent surface shadow maps (CSSMs) covering the entire scene surface is developed. CSSMs allow visibility tests between all surface points against all points in the scene. We demonstrate the effectiveness of CSSM-based visibility using a novel combination of the lightcuts algorithm and hierarchical radiosity, which can be efficiently implemented on the GPU. We demonstrate interactive n-bounce diffuse global illumination, with a final glossy bounce and many high frequency effects: general BRDFs, texture and normal maps, and local or distant lighting of arbitrary shape and distribution -- all evaluated per-pixel. Furthermore, all parameters can vary freely over time -- the only requirement is rigid geometry.

In this paper we present a new practical camera characterization technique to improve color accuracy in high dynamic range (HDR) imaging. Camera characterization refers to the process of mapping device-dependent signals, such as digital camera RAW images, into a well-defined color space. This is a well-understood process for low dynamic range (LDR) imaging and is part of most digital cameras --- usually mapping from the raw camera signal to the sRGB or Adobe RGB color space. This paper presents an efficient and accurate characterization method for high dynamic range imaging that extends previous methods originally designed for LDR imaging. We demonstrate that our characterization method is very accurate even in unknown illumination conditions, effectively turning a digital camera into a measurement device that measures physically accurate radiance values --- both in terms of luminance and color --- rivaling more expensive measurement instruments.

We propose a technique for fusing a bracketed exposure sequence into a high quality image, without converting to HDR first. Skipping the physically-based HDR assembly step simplifies the acquisition pipeline. This avoids camera response curve calibration and is computationally efficient. It also allows for including flash images in the sequence. Our technique blends multiple exposures, guided by simple quality measures like saturation and contrast. This is done in a multi-resolution fashion to account for the brightness variation in the sequence. The resulting image quality is comparable to existing tone mapping operators.

Rendering global illumination effects for dynamic scenes at interactive frame rates is a computationally challenging task. Much of the computation time needed is spent during visibility queries between individual scene elements, and it is almost illusive to update this information at real-time even for moderately complex scenes. In this paper, we propose a global illumination approach for dynamic scenes that runs at near-real-time frame rates on a single PC. Our method is inspired by the principles of hierarchical radiosity and tackles the visibility problem by implicitly evaluating mutual visibility while constructing a hierarchical link structure between scene elements. By means of the same efficient and easy-to-implement framework, we are able to reproduce a large variety of complex lighting effects for moderately sized scenes, such as interreflections, environment map lighting as well as area light sources.

We present a technique for approximating isotropic BRDFs and precomputed self-occlusion that enables accurate and efficient prefiltered environment map rendering. Our approach uses a nonlinear approximation of the BRDF as a weighted sum of isotropic Gaussian functions. Our representation requires a minimal amount of storage, can accurately represent BRDFs of arbitrary sharpness, and is above all efficient to render. We precompute visibility due to self-occlusion and store a low-frequency approximation suitable for glossy reflections. We demonstrate our method by fitting our representation to measured BRDF data, yielding high visual quality at real-time frame rates.

While measured Bidirectional Texture Functions (BTF) enable impressive realism in material appearance, they offer little control, which limits their use for content creation. In this work, we interactively manipulate BTFs and create new BTFs from flat textures. We present an out-of-core approach to manage the size of BTFs and introduce new editing operations that modify the appearance of a material. These tools achieve their full potential when selectively applied to subsets of the BTF through the use of new selection operators. We further analyze the use of our editing operators for the modification of important visual characteristics such as highlights, roughness, and fuzziness. Results compare favorably to the direct alteration of micro-geometry and reflectances of ground-truth synthetic data.

Much research in recent times has been conducted towards realtime rendering of accurate glossy reflections under direct, natural illumination including correct occlusions. The view dependent nature of these reflections will always cause this computation to be expensive unless heavily approximated. There also remains a question as to whether humans are even capable of noticing the difference in accuracy or whether our perception of the realism of the scene remains unchanged and thus the extra effort expended in rendering accurate reflections is effectively wasted. We conduct a user study to analyse any decline in perceived realism of glossy scenes rendered with a variety of specular occlusion approximations under a multitude of BRDFs, lighting environments and camera orientations. We demonstrate that although no one approximation is always suitable, it is rare to have a scene whose computational complexity cannot be decreased to some degree.

We present Convolution Shadow Maps, a novel shadow representation that affords efficient arbitrary linear filtering of shadows. Traditional shadow mapping is inherently non-linear w.r.t. the stored depth values, due to the binary shadow test. We linearize the problem by approximating shadow test as a weighted summation of basis terms. We demonstrate the usefulness of this representation, and show that hardware-accelerated anti-aliasing techniques, such as tri-linear filtering, can be applied naturally to Convolution Shadow Maps. Our approach can be implemented very efficiently in current generation graphics hardware, and offers real-time frame rates.

We present a new method for interactive illumination computations based on precomputed visibility using coherent shadow maps (CSMs). It is well-known that visibility queries dominate the cost of physically based rendering. Precomputing all visibility events, for instance in the form of many shadow maps, enables fast queries and allows for real-time computation of illumination but requires prohibitive amounts of storage. We propose a lossless compression scheme for visibility information based on shadow maps that efficiently exploits coherence. We demonstrate a Monte Carlo renderer for direct lighting using CSMs that runs entirely on graphics hardware. We support spatially varying BRDFs, normal maps, and environment maps all with high frequencies, spatial as well as angular. Multiple dynamic rigid objects can be combined in a scene. As opposed to precomputed radiance transfer techniques, that assume distant lighting, our method includes distant lighting as well as local area lights of arbitrary shape, varying intensity, or anisotropic light distribution that can freely vary over time.

Much progress has been made toward interactive ray tracing, but most research has focused specifically on ray casting. A common approach is to use "packets" of rays to amortize cost across sets of rays. Whether "packets" can be used to speed up the cost of reflection and refraction rays is unclear. The issue is complicated since such rays do not share common origins and often have less directional coherence than viewing and shadow rays. Since the primary advantage of ray tracing over rasterization is the computation of global effects, such as accurate reflection and refraction, this lack of knowledge should be corrected. We are also interested in exploring whether distribution ray tracing, due to its stochastic properties, further erodes the effectiveness of techniques used to accelerate ray casting. This paper addresses the question of whether packet-based ray algorithms can be effectively used for more than visibility computation. We show that by choosing an appropriate data structure and a suitable packet assembly algorithm we can extend the idea of "packets" from ray casting to Whitted-style and distribution ray tracing, while maintaining efficiency.

This course discusses the practical implementation of physically-principled reflectance models in interactive graphics and video games, in current practice as well as upcoming technologies. The course begins with the visual phenomena important to the perception of reflectance in real-world materials, which it uses as background for the underlying theory and derivation of common reflectance models. After introducing the current game development pipeline, from content creation to rendering, the course then discusses rendering techniques for implementing reflectance models in games --- with emphasis on real-world trade offs such as shader performance, content creation efficiency, resource size considerations, and overall rendering quality. The course will help a researcher understand constraints in the game development pipeline and it will help a game developer understand the physical phenomena underlying reflectance models.

Texture variation on real-world objects often correlates with underlying geometric characteristics and creates a visually rich appearance. We present a technique to transfer such geometry-dependent texture variation from an example textured model to new geometry in a visually consistent way. It captures the correlation between a set of geometric features, such as curvature, and the observed diffuse texture. We perform dimensionality reduction on the overcomplete feature set which yields a compact guidance field that is used to drive a spatially varying texture synthesis model. In addition, we introduce a method to enrich the guidance field when the target geometry strongly differs from the example. Our method transfers elaborate texture variation that follows geometric features, which gives 3D models a compelling photorealistic appearance.

We propose a real-time method for rendering rigid objects with complex view-dependent effects under distant all-frequency lighting. Existing precomputed light transport approaches can render rich global illumination effects, but high-frequency view-dependent effects such as sharp highlights remain a challenge. We introduce a new representation of the light transport operator based on sums of Gaussians. The nonlinear parameters of our representation enable 1) arbitrary bandwidth because scale is encoded as a direct parameter, and 2) high-quality interpolation across view and mesh triangles because we interpolate the mean direction of the Gaussians, thereby preventing linear cross-fading artifacts. However, fitting the precomputed light transport data to this new representation requires solving a nonlinear regression problem that is more involved than traditional linear and nonlinear (truncation) approximation techniques. We present a new data fitting method based on optimization that includes energy terms aimed at enforcing artifactfree interpolation. We demonstrate that our method achieves high visual quality with a small storage cost and an efficient rendering algorithm.

Interactive rendering of realistic objects under general lighting models poses three principal challenges. Handling complex light transport phenomena like shadows, inter-reflections, caustics and sub-surface scattering is difficult to do in real time. Integrating these effects over large area light sources compounds the difficulty, and finally real objects have complex spatially-varying BRDF's. Precomputed Radiance Transfer (PRT) encapsulates a family of techniques that partially addresses these challenges. PRT is an active of area of research that has relevance to both the academic research community and practitioners of interactive computer graphics. This technique and its variants are being actively investigated in the game development community and there is quite a lot of interest due to the recent appearance of PRT techniques in games such as "Halo 2". This course covers these techniques, compares them and discusses their various strengths and weaknesses.

A novel approach is presented to efficiently render local subsurface scattering effects. We introduce an importance sampling scheme for a practical subsurface scattering model. It leads to a simple and efficient rendering algorithm, which operates in image- or texture-space, and which is even amenable for implementation on graphics hardware. We demonstrate the applicability of our technique to the problem of skin rendering, for which the subsurface transport of light typically remains local. Our implementation shows that plausible images can be rendered interactively using hardware acceleration.

We present a method for interactive rendering of dynamic models with self-shadows due to time-varying, low-frequency lighting environments. In contrast to previous techniques, the method is not limited to static or pre-animated models. Our main contribution is a hemispherical rasterizer, which rapidly computes visibility by rendering blocker geometry into a 2D occlusion mask with correct occluder fusion. The response of an object to the lighting is found by integrating the visibility function at each of the vertices against the spherical harmonic functions and the BRDF. This yields transfer coefficients that are then multiplied by the lighting coefficients to obtain the final, shadowed exitant radiance. No precomputation is necessary and memory requirements are modest. The method supports both diffuse and glossy BRDFs.

Self-shadowing is an important factor in the appearance of hair and fur. In this paper we present a new rendering algorithm to accurately compute shadowed hair at interactive rates using graphics hardware. No constraint is imposed on the hair style, and its geometry can be dynamic.
Similar to previously presented methods, a 1D visibility function is constructed for each line of sight of the light source view. Our approach differs from other work by treating the hair geometry as a 3D density field, which is sampled on the fly using simple rasterization. The rasterized fragments are clustered, effectively estimating the density of hair along a ray. Based hereon, the visibility function is constructed. We show that realistic self-shadowing of thousands of individual dynamic hair strands can be rendered at interactive rates using consumer graphics hardware.

Spherical harmonics are often used for compact description of incident radiance in low-frequency but distant lighting environments. For interaction with nearby emitters, computing the incident radiance at the center of an object only is not sufficient. Previous techniques then require expensive sampling of the incident radiance field at many points distributed over the object. Our technique alleviates this costly requirement using a first-order Taylor expansion of the spherical-harmonic lighting coefficients around a point. We propose an interpolation scheme based on these gradients requiring far fewer samples (one is often sufficient). We show that the gradient of the incident-radiance spherical harmonics can be computed for little additional cost compared to the coefficients alone. We introduce a semi-analytical formula to calculate this gradient at run-time and describe how a simple vertex shader can interpolate the shading. The interpolated representation of the incident radiance can be used with any low-frequency light-transfer technique.

We present a technique for the easy acquisition of realistic materials and mesostructures, without acquiring the actual BRDF. The method uses the observation that under certain circumstances the mesostructure of a surface can be acquired independently of the underlying BRDF.
The acquired data can be used directly for rendering with little preprocessing. Rendering is possible using an offline renderer but also using graphics hardware, where it achieves real-time frame rates. Compelling results are achieved for a wide variety of materials.

Traditionally, hardware rasterizers only support the Phong lighting model in combination with Gouraud shading using point light sources. However, the Phong lighting model is strictly empirical and physically implausible. Gouraud shading also tends to undersample the highlight unless a highly tesselated surface is used. Hence, higherquality hardware accelerated lighting and shading has gained much interest in the recent five years.
The research on hardware lighting and shading is two-fold. On the one hand, better lighting models for local illumination (assuming point light sources but evaluated per pixel) were demonstrated to be amenable to hardware implementation. On the other hand, recent research has demonstrated that even area lights, represented as environment maps, can be combined with complex lighting models. In both areas, many articles have been published, making it hard to decide which algorithm is well-suited for which application. This state-of-the-art report will review all relevent articles in both areas, and list advantages and disadvantages of each algorithm.

In this paper, we propose a simple approach for rendering diffuse and glossy reflections using environment maps. This approach is geared towards VR applications, where realism and fast rendering is important. We exploit certain properties of diffuse reflections and certain features of graphics hardware for glossy reflections. This results in a very fast, single-pass rendering algorithm, which even allows to dynamically vary the incident lighting.

A novel approach is presented to efficiently render local subsurface scattering effects. We introduce an importance sampling scheme for a practical subsurface scattering model. It leads to a simple and efficient rendering algorithm, which operates in image-space, and which is even amenable for implementation on graphics hardware. We demonstrate the applicability of our technique to the problem of skin rendering, for which the subsurface transport of light typically remains local. Our implementation shows that plausible images can be rendered interactively using hardware acceleration.

Realistic rendering of materials such as milk, fruits, wax, marble, and so on, requires the simulation of subsurface scattering of light. This paper presents an algorithm for plausible reproduction of subsurface scattering effects. Unlike previously proposed work, our algorithm allows to interactively change lighting, viewpoint, subsurface scattering properties, as well as object geometry.
The key idea of our approach is to use a hierarchical boundary element method to solve the integral describing subsurface scattering when using a recently proposed analytical BSSRDF model. Our approach is inspired by hierarchical radiosity with clustering. The success of our approach is in part due to a semi-analytical integration method that allows to compute needed point-to-patch form-factor like transport coefficients efficiently and accurately where other methods fail.
Our experiments show that high-quality renderings of translucent objects consisting of tens of thousands of polygons can be obtained from scratch in fractions of a second. An incremental update algorithm further speeds up rendering after material or geometry changes.

Global illumination algorithms usually spend the majority of time on visibility computations. It therefore seems natural to reuse visibility information acquired at one point for different computations. For example, once we've established the visibility between two points in a scene, we can use this information for multiple light paths in which different amounts of energy are transported between the points. This is particularly advantageous in cases where we need to compute multiple images with varying illumination or camera settings.
Researchers have developed several approaches where illumination information computed for one point in the scene is reused for nearby points. Because these methods store illumination information (irradiance or incident radiance) at discrete points, it isn't possible to reuse the information for light source changes. In addition, finding the desired information for one point in space requires a search through the data structure. Although we can perform this search in logarithmic expected time, the resulting memory access patterns are irregular and can significantly affect performance.
We take a different approach. Instead of storing and reusing illumination information, we directly reuse visibility information stored in a regular fashion that allows for constant time lookups. Our method is a generalization of Heidrich et al.'s method for height fields to different geometries such as general parametric surfaces, triangle meshes without a global parameterization, and volumes. For each case we propose efficient algorithms for computing direct and indirect illumination, which also account for shadows. Using the method of dependent tests - a variant of Monte Carlo integration - we can access the visibility in a structured fashion. This allows for efficient memory access patterns in software implementations and lets us use graphics hardware for the light transport.

Precomputed Radiance Transfer allows interactive rendering of objects illuminated by low-frequency environment maps, including self-shadowing and interreflections. The expensive integration of incident lighting is partially precomputed and stored as matrices.
Incorporating anisotropic, glossy BRDFs into precomputed radiance transfer has been previously shown to be possible, but none of the previous methods offer real-time performance. We propose a new method, matrix radiance transfer, which significantly speeds up exit radiance computation and allows anisotropic BRDFs. We generalize the previous radiance transfer methods to work with a matrix representation of the BRDF and optimize exit radiance computation by expressing the exit radiance in a new, directionally locally supported basis set instead of the spherical harmonics. To determine exit radiance, our method performs four dot products per vertex in contrast to previous methods, where a full matrix-vector multiply is required. Image quality can be controlled by adapting the number of basis functions. We compress our radiance transfer matrices through principal component analysis (PCA). We show that it is possible to render directly from the PCA representation, which also enables the user to trade interactively between quality and speed.

Real-world objects are usually composed of a number of different materials that often show subtle changes even within a single material. Photorealistic rendering of such objects requires accurate measurements of the reflection properties of each material, as well as the spatially varying effects. We present an image-based measuring method that robustly detects the different materials of real objects and fits an average bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) to each of them. In order to model local changes as well, we project the measured data for each surface point into a basis formed by the recovered BRDFs leading to a truly spatially varying BRDF representation. Real-world objects often also have fine geometric detail that is not represented in an acquired mesh. To increase the detail, we derive normal maps even for non-Lambertian surfaces using our measured BRDFs. A high quality model of a real object can be generated with relatively little input data. The generated model allows for rendering under arbitrary viewing and lighting conditions and realistically reproduces the appearance of the original object.

This paper presents a rendering method for translucent objects, in which view point and illumination can be modi- fied at interactive rates. In a preprocessing step the impulse response to incoming light impinging at each surface point is computed and stored in two different ways: The local effect on close-by surface points is modeled as a per-texel filter kernel that is applied to a texture map representing the incident illumination. The global response (i.e. light shining through the object) is stored as vertex-to-vertex throughput factors for the triangle mesh of the object. During rendering, the illumination map for the object is computed according to the current lighting situation and then filtered by the precomputed kernels. The illumination map is also used to derive the incident illumination on the vertices which is distributed via the vertex-to-vertex throughput factors to the other vertices. The final image is obtained by combining the local and global response. We demonstrate the performance of our method for several models.

We present a real-time hardware accelerated method for rendering objects using halftoning. It is solely based on texture mapping and creates the impression of a printed image, although the lighting and the objects can be changed and manipulated on-the-fly.

Quite a few techniques have been proposed on how to implement more complex and realistic shading models with graphics hardware, making them useful for games. Still, these techniques are rarely used probably due to two reasons: complex implementation issues and unintuitive parameters for the used shading models. We propose to use a simple technique called "NDF shading". It allows an artist to handcraft shading models; shape and color of highlights are simply stored in a bitmap. The technique uses per-pixel shading, and can also be used in conjunction with bump mapping; anisotropic shading models can also be created.

We present a new, real-time method for rendering diffuse and glossy objects in low-frequency lighting environments that captures soft shadows, interreflections, and caustics. As a preprocess, a novel global transport simulator creates functions over the object's surface representing transfer of arbitrary, low-frequency incident lighting into transferred radiance which includes global effects like shadows and interreflections from the object onto itself. At run-time, these transfer functions are applied to actual incident lighting. Dynamic, local lighting is handled by sampling it close to the object every frame; the object can also be rigidly rotated with respect to the lighting and vice versa. Lighting and transfer functions are represented using low-order spherical harmonics. This avoids aliasing and evaluates efficiently on graphics hardware by reducing the shading integral to a dot product of 9 to 25 element vectors for diffuse receivers. Glossy objects are handled using matrices rather than vectors. We further introduce functions for radiance transfer from a dynamic lighting environment through a preprocessed object to neighboring points in space. These allow soft shadows and caustics from rigidly moving objects to be cast onto arbitrary, dynamic receivers. We demonstrate real-time global lighting effects with this approach.

Real-time shading using general (e.g., anisotropic) BRDFs has so far been limited to a few point or directional light sources. We extend such shading to smooth, area lighting using a low-order spherical harmonic basis for the lighting environment. We represent the 4D product function of BRDF times the cosine factor (dot product of the incident lighting and surface normal vectors) as a 2D table of spherical harmonic coefficients. Each table entry represents, for a single view direction, the integral of this product function times lighting on the hemisphere expressed in spherical harmonics. This reduces the shading integral to a simple dot product of 25 component vectors, easily evaluatable on PC graphics hardware. Non-trivial BRDF models require rotating the lighting coefficients to a local frame at each point on an object, currently forming the computational bottleneck. Real-time results can be achieved by fixing the view to allow dynamic lighting or vice versa. We also generalize a previous method for precomputed radiance transfer to handle general BRDF shading. This provides shadows and interreflections that respond in real-time to lighting changes on a preprocessed object of arbitrary material (BRDF) type.

In this paper we present a method that automatically synthesizes bump maps at arbitrary levels of detail in real-time. The only input data we require is a normal density function; the bump map is generated according to that function. It is also used to shade the generated bump map.
The technique allows to infinitely zoom into the surface, because more (consistent) detail can be created on the fly. The shading of such a surface is consistent when displayed at different distances to the viewer (assuming that the surface structure is self-similar).
The bump map generation and the shading algorithm can also be used separately.

The measurement of accurate material properties is an important step towards photorealistic rendering. Many real-world objects are composed of a number of materials that often show subtle changes even within a single material. Thus, for photorealistic rendering both the general surface properties as well as the spatially varying effects of the object are needed.
We present an image-based measuring method that robustly detects the different materials of real objects and fits an average bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) to each of them. In order to model the local changes as well, we project the measured data for each surface point into a basis formed by the recovered BRDFs leading to a truly spatially varying BRDF representation.
A high quality model of a real object can be generated with relatively few input data. The generated model allows for rendering under arbitrary viewing and lighting conditions and realistically reproduces the appearance of the original object.

In this paper, we present a technique for rendering displacement mapped geometry using current graphics hardware.
Our method renders a displacement by slicing through the enclosing volume. The alpha-test is used to render only the appropriate parts of every slice. The slices need not to be aligned with the base surface, e.g. it is possible to do screen-space aligned slicing.
We then extend the method to be able to render the intersection between several displacement mapped polygons. This is used to render a new kind of image-based objects based on images with depth, which we call image based depth objects.
This technique can also directly be used to accelerate the rendering of objects using the image-based visual hull. Other warping based IBR techniques can be accelerated in a similar manner.

Within the game development community, several current approaches address the illumination problem. Point lights (with optional fog, distance, or shadow attenuation) are often used to determine the amount of light that arrives at a surface. Directional light sources and light maps effectively serve this purpose as well. Unfortunately, sophisticated models of reflectance have not really made an appearance in games. In terms of reflectance, most games to date use the Phong reflectance model or rely on strict intensity modulation to determine how surfaces reflect the light that strikes them. While this is not a bad thing, Phong reflectance and intensity modulation are limited in the type of lighting phenomena they are capable of simulating. Consequently, they are unable to reproduce the appearance that we observe of many real-world materials.
This two-part series of articles focuses on the reflectance aspect of lighting. We will discuss a technique that implements more general reflectance models for a wide variety of surface materials, for example velvet, copper, and others. This is called separable decomposition and is an effective and efficient way to incorporate physically accurate reflection models and ultimately increase the level of realism in a game. The technique can be used in conjunction with point light sources, directional light sources, light maps, shadows, and fog, since each of these influences only the illumination component of lighting and does not affect the reflectance model.

In this paper a technique is presented that combines interactive hardware accelerated bump mapping with shift-variant anisotropic reflectance models. An evolutionary path is shown how some simpler reflectance models can be rendered at interactive rates on current low-end graphics hardware, and how features from future graphics hardware can be exploited for more complex models.
We show how our method can be applied to some well known reflectance models, namely the Banks model, Ward's model, and an anisotropic version of the Blinn-Phong model, but it is not limited to these models.
Furthermore, we take a close look at the necessary capabilities of the graphics hardware, identify problems with current hardware, and discuss possible enhancements.

Many researchers have been arguing that geometry, bump maps, and BRDFs present a hierarchy of detail that should be exploited for efficient rendering purposes. In practice however, this is often not possible due to inconsistencies in the illumination for these different levels of detail. For example, while bump map rendering often only considers direct illumination and no shadows, geometry-based rendering and BRDFs will mostly also respect shadowing effects, and in many cases even indirect illumination caused by scattered light.
In this paper, we present an approach for overcoming these inconsistencies. We introduce an inexpensive method for consistently illuminating height fields and bump maps, as well as simulating BRDFs based on precomputed visibility information. With this information we can achieve a consistent illumination across the levels of detail.
The method we propose offers significant performance benefits over existing algorithms for computing the light scattering in height fields and for computing a sampled BRDF representation using a virtual gonioreflectometer. The performance can be further improved by utilizing graphics hardware, which then also allows for interactive display.
Finally, our method also approximates the changes in illumination when the height field, bump map, or BRDF is applied to a surface with a different curvature.

Different methods for prefiltered environment maps have been proposed, each of which has different advantages and disadvantages. We present a general notation for prefiltered environment maps, which will be used to classify and compare the existing methods. Based on that knowledge we develop three new algorithms: 1. A fast hierarchical prefiltering method that can be utilized for all previously proposed prefiltered environment maps. 2. A technique for hardware-accelerated prefiltering of environment maps that achieves interactive rates even on low-end workstations. 3. Anisotropic environment maps using the Banks model.

A method is presented that can render glossy reflections with arbitrary isotropic bidirectional reflectance distribution functions (BRDFs) at interactive rates using texture mapping. This method is based on the well-known environment map technique for specular reflections.
Our approach uses a single- or multilobe representation of bidirectional reflectance distribution functions, where the shape of each radially symmetric lobe is also a function of view elevation. This approximate representation can be computed efficiently using local greedy fitting techniques. Each lobe is used to filter specular environment maps during a preprocessing step, resulting in a three-dimensional environment map. For many BRDFs, simplifications using lower-dimensional approximations, coarse sampling with respect to view elevation, and small numbers of lobes can still result in a convincing approximation to the true surface reflectance.

A separable decomposition of bidirectional reflectance distributions (BRDFs) is used to implement arbitrary reflectances from point sources on existing graphics hardware. Two-dimensional texture mapping and compositing operations are used to reconstruct samples of the BRDF at every pixel at interactive rates.
A change of variables, the Gram-Schmidt halfangle/difference vector parameterization, improves separability. Two decomposition algorithms are also presented. The singular value decomposition (SVD) minimizes RMS error. The normalized decomposition is fast and simple, using no more space than what is required for the final representation.

Complex luminaries and lamp geometries can greatly increase the realism of synthetic images.
Unfortunately, the correct rendering of illumination from complex lamps requires costly global illumination algorithms to simulate the indirect illumination re- flected or refracted by parts of the lamp. Currently, this simulation has to be repeated for every scene in which a lamp is to be used, and even for multiple instances of a lamp within a single scene.
In this paper, we separate the global illumination simulation of the interior lamp geometry from the actual scene rendering. The lightfield produced by a given lamp is computed using any of the known global illumination algorithms. Afterwards, a discretized version of this lightfield is stored away for later use as a lightsource. We describe how this data can be efficiently utilized to illuminate a given scene using a number of different rendering algorithms, such as ray-tracing and hardware-based rendering.