Efficient Sampling of Textured Scenes in Vertex Tracing

Abstract

We present vertex tracing, an adaptive progressive ray tracing approach for efficient sampling of the radiance function, based on refinement in object space and subsequent reconstruction, using standard 3D graphics accelerator hardware. The main focus of this paper is the reconstruction of reflected and transmitted texture maps. By taking advantage of the newest graphics hardware features (such as the pixel shader) even higher levels of recursion can be supported without explicit sampling of the textures. In addition, the graphics hardware is used for an efficient visibility test, which leads to a further reduction of ray samples, and for the rendering of diffuse local illumination effects, as well as for progressive rendering of the global illumination effects, which are superimposed over the hardware-rendered scene in object space. With this approach, interactive performance for realistically rendered illumination effects of scenes of average complexity, can be achieved on a standard PC with off-the-shelf 3D graphics accelerators.