Out of Core Photon-Mapping for Large Buildings

Abstract

This paper describes a new scheme for computing out-of-core global illumination in complex indoor scenes using a photon-mapping approach. Our method makes use of a cells-and-portals representation of the environment for preserving memory coherence and storing rays or photons. We have successfully applied our method to various buildings, composed of up to one billion triangles. As shown in the results, our method requires only a few hundred megabytes of memory for tracing more than 1.6 billion photons in large buildings.