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Abstract

The goal of this thesis is to produce plausible global illumination in real time using temporal coherence. While direct illumination combined with precomputed static global illumination is widely used in today’s computer games and 3D applications, real-time global illumination that supports arbitrary dynamic scenes and light setups is still an active area of research. This master thesis gives an introduction to global illumination and discusses various methods that have been developed. However, since most of the existing methods need some kind of precomputation to calculate global illumination in real time, they also introduce limitations like static light, scenes or view points. Furthermore other algorithms are not suitable for the capabilities of current graphics hardware or are simply fake approaches. The core of this thesis is an improved version of the instant radiosity and imperfect shadow maps algorithm that reuses illumination information from previous frames. The previous approaches needed a high number of so called virtual point lights to get convincing results, whereas our method achieves visually pleasing results with only a few virtual point lights. As a second extension to the base algorithms we introduce a new method to compute multiple light bounces. In this method the fill rate is drastically reduced and therefore computation time is much lower than in previous aproaches.

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BibTeX

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@mastersthesis{knecht-2009-MKN,
  title =      "Real-Time Global Illumination Using Temporal Coherence",
  author =     "Martin Knecht",
  year =       "2009",
  abstract =   "The goal of this thesis is to produce plausible global
               illumination in real time using temporal coherence. While
               direct illumination combined with precomputed static global
               illumination is widely used in today’s computer games
               and 3D applications, real-time global illumination that
               supports arbitrary dynamic scenes and light setups is still
               an active area of research. This master thesis gives an
               introduction to global illumination and discusses various
               methods that have been developed. However, since most of the
               existing methods need some kind of precomputation to
               calculate global illumination in real time, they also
               introduce limitations like static light, scenes or view
               points. Furthermore other algorithms are not suitable for
               the capabilities of current graphics hardware or are simply
               fake approaches. The core of this thesis is an improved
               version of the instant radiosity and imperfect shadow maps
               algorithm that reuses illumination information from previous
               frames. The previous approaches needed a high number of so
               called virtual point lights to get convincing results,
               whereas our method achieves visually pleasing results with
               only a few virtual point lights. As a second extension to
               the base algorithms we introduce a new method to compute
               multiple light bounces. In this method the fill rate is
               drastically reduced and therefore computation time is much
               lower than in previous aproaches.",
  address =    "Favoritenstrasse 9-11/186, A-1040 Vienna, Austria",
  school =     "Institute of Computer Graphics and Algorithms, Vienna
               University of Technology",
  month =      jul,
  keywords =   "Real Time Rendering, Global Illumination, Instant Radiosity,
               Temporal Coherence",
  URL =        "http://www.cg.tuwien.ac.at/research/publications/2009/knecht-2009-MKN/",
}