Spotted: Efficient shading of indirect illumination applying reflective shadow maps

Using reflective shadow maps to make global illumination more efficient. The shadow maps reduce the number of samples required. 

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// published on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games-Latest Proceeding Volume // visit site

Efficient shading of indirect illumination applying reflective shadow maps
Philipp Lensing, Wolfgang Broll

While global illumination is a crucial issue for most computer graphics applications fostering photo realistic rendering, fast and efficient implementations remain challenging for real-time applications. One approach to approximate indirect illumination is to distribute virtual point lights (VPL) at surfaces that emit indirect light. This distribution may be realized using reflective shadow maps (RSM). One major drawback of this approach is that each surface point has to be illuminated by thousands of VPLs, leading to a performance bottleneck in the shading step. Therefore several approaches trying to reduce the shading costs either by decreasing the number of VPLs or by lowering the surface points to be shaded exist.