Chapter Seventeen Light Transport III: Precomputed Light Transport

The rendering algorithms in the preceeding chapters generally take minutes to hours of computation to generate high-quality imagery for interesting scenes. This is in general the price to be paid for their robustness, flexibility, and generality. Of course, this computational cost has a number of disadvantages. Artists modeling scenes generally desire quick feedback, and many applications require not just faster rendering but also full interactivity.

It’s desirable that the images generated by interactive rendering share in the benefits of the improvements in light transport algorithms of recent years. A variety of precomputed light transport algorithms have been developed to ...

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