The Bounced Z-buffer for Indirect Visibility

Abstract

Synthesizing images of animated scenes with indirect illumination and glossy materials at interactive frame rates commonly ignores indirect shadows. In this work we extend a class of indirect lighting algorithms that splat shading to a framebuffer - we demonstrate deep screen space and ambient occlusion volumes - to include indirect visibility. To this end we propose the bounced z-buffer: While a common z-buffered framebuffer, at each pixel, maintains the distance from the closest surface and its radiance along a direction from the camera to that pixel, our new representation contains the distance from the closest surface and its radiance after one indirect bounce into a certain other direction. Consequently, with bounced z-buffering, only the splat from the nearest emitter in one direction contributes to each pixel. Importance-sampling the bounced directions according to the product of cosine term and BRDF allows to approximate full shading by a simple sum of neighboring framebuffer pixels.