Abstract: Recent advances in global illumination methods make them more useful for "real" production work. This note starts with a list of requirements for rendering in industry. We then proceed with some examples of photosurrealistic global illumination, ie. global illumination manipulated in non-physical ways. We also give an overview of a new method to compute global illumination in very complex scenes. The method uses ray differentials and a multiresolution geometry cache to deal with geometric complexity. Finally, we describe how to "bake" and reuse global illumination results for faster rendering.

One-line summary: Global illumination is finally ready for prime time!

Published in: Cyrille Damez, Philipp Slusallek, Bruce J. Walter, Karol Myszkowski, Ingo Wald, and Per H. Christensen. Global Illumination for Interactive Applications and High-Quality Animations. SIGGRAPH 2003 Course Note #27. ACM, July 2003. (San Diego, USA, July 27-31.)

Course web page: Global Illumination for Interactive Applications and High-Quality Animations.

Download course note here: course27.pdf (15 MB).

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