CALCULATING GLOBAL ILLUMINATION FOR GLOSSY SURFACES

Photorealistic rendering is used to generate views of computer stored scenes. Global illumination algorithms take all transfers of light in the scene into account thereby creating a realistic looking image. Pre viously several approaches have been presented which art: able to deal with global illumination for diffuse surfaces, More general surfaces are handled only by few methods. This work presents a new algorithm fo r the generation of photorealistic images for scenes with arbitrary su rfaces. Initially particle tracing and a reconstruction phase are used to obtain a good approximation to the directionally dependent illumin ation in the scene. The illumination information is stored and can be used subsequently to generate images from different viewpoints directl y from the stored solution. The whole system is structured into severa l independent phases and is designed to allow parallel processing and incremental refinement. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights rese rved.