Fast GPU-based Visibility Computation for Natural Illumination of Volume Data Sets

Abstract

Pre-computed radiance transfer (PRT) has been used to render volumetric data under distant low-frequency illumination at real-time rates, including natural illumination, soft shadows, attenuation from semi-transparent occluders and multiple scattering. PRT requires a lengthy pre-process, which is acceptable only for static volume data. However, in practical volume rendering, general transfer functions are used. Manipulating such a transfer function will result in a dynamic radiance transfer which has to be re-computed. This work proposes a fast way for this re-computation. While previous work has used CPU Monte Carlo ray-tracing for pre-computation and requires time in the order of many minutes, our GPU implementation uses a hierarchical visibility approximation implemented entirely on the GPU and requires only a few seconds for typical scenes.