Efficient glossy global illumination with interactive viewing

The ability to perform interactive walkthroughs of global illumination solu tions including glossy effects is a challenging open problem. In this paper we overcome certain limitations of previous approaches. We first introduce a novel, memory- and compute-efficient representation of incoming illumina tion, in the context of a hierarchical radiance clustering algorithm. We th en represent outgoing radiance with an adaptive hierarchical basis, in a ma nner suitable for interactive display. Using appropriate refinement and dis play strategies, we achieve walkthroughs of glossy solutions at interactive rates for non-trivial scenes. In addition, our implementation has been dev eloped to be portable and easily adaptable as an extension to existing, dif fuse-only, hierarchical radiosity systems. We present results of the implem entation of glossy global illumination in two independent global illuminati on systems.