IMPLEMENTATION AND ANALYSIS OF AN IMAGE-BASED GLOBAL ILLUMINATION FRAMEWORK FOR ANIMATED ENVIRONMENTS

We describe a new framework for efficiently computing and storing glob al illumination effects for complex, animated environments. The new fr amework allows the rapid generation of sequences representing any arbi trary path in a ''view space'' within an environment in which both the viewer and objects move. The global illumination is stored as time se quences of range-images at base locations that span the view space. We present algorithms for determining locations for these base images, a nd the time steps required to adequately capture the effects of object motion. We also present algorithms for computing the global illuminat ion in the base images that exploit spatial and temporal coherence by considering direct and indirect illumination separately. We discuss an initial implementation using the new framework. Results and analysis of our implementation demonstrate the effectiveness of the individual phases of the approach; we conclude with an application of the complet e framework to a complex environment that includes object motion.