Signed Distance Fields Dynamic Diffuse Global Illumination

TL;DR

This paper introduces a real-time method for dynamic diffuse global illumination using signed distance fields, enabling high-quality, multi-bounce lighting in complex scenes without precomputations.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach that approximates scene geometry with signed distance fields to compute dynamic diffuse GI efficiently and accurately in real-time.

Findings

Supports multi-bounce GI without precomputations

Handles large and detailed scenes without noise

Achieves high performance and quality in real-time

Abstract

Global Illumination (GI) is of utmost importance in the field of photo-realistic rendering. However, its computation has always been very complex, especially diffuse GI. State of the art real-time GI methods have limitations of different nature, such as light leaking, performance issues, special hardware requirements, noise corruption, bounce number limitations, among others. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel approach of computing dynamic diffuse GI with a signed distance fields approximation of the scene and discretizing the space domain of the irradiance function. With this approach, we are able to estimate real-time diffuse GI for dynamic lighting and geometry, without any precomputations and supporting multi-bounce GI, providing good quality lighting and high performance at the same time. Our algorithm is also able to achieve better scalability, and manage both large open scenes and indoor high-detailed scenes without being corrupted by noise.