Real-time Indirect Illumination of Emissive Inhomogeneous Volumes using Layered Polygonal Area Lights

Abstract

Indirect illumination involving with visually rich participating media such as turbulent smoke and loud explosions contributes significantly to the appearances of other objects in a rendering scene. However, previous real-time techniques have focused only on the appearances of the media directly visible from the viewer. Specifically, appearances that can be indirectly seen over reflective surfaces have not attracted much attention. In this paper, we present a real-time rendering technique for such indirect views that involves the participating media. To achieve real-time performance for computing indirect views, we leverage layered polygonal area lights (LPALs) that can be obtained by slicing the media into multiple flat layers. Using this representation, radiance entering each surface point from each slice of the volume is analytically evaluated to achieve instant calculation. The analytic solution can be derived for standard bidirectional reflectance distribution functions (BRDFs) based on the microfacet theory. Accordingly, our method is sufficiently robust to work on surfaces with arbitrary shapes and roughness values. In addition, we propose a quadrature method for more accurate rendering of scenes with dense volumes, and a transformation of the domain of volumes to simplify the calculation and implementation of the proposed method. By taking advantage of these computation techniques, the proposed method achieves real-time rendering of indirect illumination for emissive volumes.