Chapter 39. Global Illumination Using Progressive Refinement Radiosity

Greg CoombeUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Mark HarrisNVIDIA Corporation

With the advent of powerful graphics hardware, people have begun to look beyond local illumination models toward more complicated global illumination models, such as those made possible by ray tracing and radiosity. Global illumination, which incorporates interobject effects such as shadows and interreflections, attains a compelling level of visual realism that is difficult to achieve with local illumination models.

In this chapter we describe a method for computing radiosity that performs all of the computation on the GPU. The radiosity energy is stored in texels, and fragment programs are used ...

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