Area Lights in Signed Distance Function Scenes

Abstract

This paper presents two algorithms to incorporate spherical and general area lights into scenes defined by signed distance functions. The first algorithm employs an efficient approximation to the contribution of spherical lights to direct illumination and renders them at real-time rates. The second algorithm is of superior quality at a higher computational cost which is better suited for interactive rates. Our results are compared to both real-time soft shadow algorithms and a ground truth obtained by Monte Carlo integration. We show in these comparisons that our real-time solution computes more accurate shadows while the more demanding variant outperforms Monte Carlo integration at the expense of accuracy.