research-article

Complex Luminaires: Illumination and Appearance Rendering

Authors:

Edgar Velázquez-Armendáriz,

Donald P. GreenbergAuthors Info & Claims

ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG), Volume 34, Issue 3

Article No.: 26, Pages 1 - 15

https://doi.org/10.1145/2714571

Published: 08 May 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Simulating a complex luminaire such as a chandelier is expensive and slow, even using state-of-the-art algorithms. A more practical alternative is to use precomputation to accelerate rendering. Prior approaches cached information on an aperture surface that separates the luminaire from the scene, but many luminaires have large or ill-defined apertures leading to excessive data storage and inaccurate results.

In this article, we separate luminaire rendering into illumination and appearance components. A precomputation stage simulates the complex light flow inside the luminaire to generate two data structures: a set of anisotropic point lights (APLs) and a radiance volume. The APLs are located near apparent sources and represent the light leaving the luminaire, allowing its nearand far-field illumination to be accurately and efficiently computed at render time. The luminaire's appearance consists of high- and low-frequency components, which are both visually important. High-frequency components are computed dynamically at render time, while the more computationally expensive low-frequency components are approximated using the precomputed radiance volume.

Results are shown for several complex luminaires, demonstrating orders of magnitude faster rendering compared to the best global illumination algorithms and higher fidelity with greatly reduced storage requirements compared to previous precomputed approaches.

References

[1]

I. Ashdown. 1993. Near-field photometry: A new approach. J. Illumin. Engin. Soc. 22, 1, 163--180.

[2]

I. Ashdown. 2001. Thinking photometrically part ii. In Proceedings of the LIGHTFAIR Pre-Conference Workshop. 1--46.

[3]

I. Ashdown and R. Rykowski. 1998. Making near-field photometry practical. J. Illumin. Engin. Soc. North Amer. 27, 1, 67--79.

[4]

C. Dachsbacher, J. Krivanek, M. Hasan, A. Arbree, B. Walter, and J. Novak. 2012. Scalable realistic rendering with many-light methods. Comput. Graph. Forum 33, 1, 88--104.

Digital Library

[5]

T. Driemeyer. 2008. Rendering with Mental Ray, 3^rd Ed. Springer.

Digital Library

[6]

I. Georgiev, J. Krivanek, T. Davidovic, and P. Slusallek. 2012. Light transport simulation with vertex connection and merging. ACM Trans. Graph. 31, 6, 192:1--192:10.

Digital Library

[7]

M. Goesele, X. Granier, W. Heidrich, and H.-P. Seidel. 2003. Accurate light source acquisition and rendering. ACM Trans. Graph. 22, 3, 621--630.

Digital Library

[8]

S. J. Gortler, R. Grzeszczuk, R. Szeliski, and M. F. Cohen. 1996. The lumigraph. In Proceedings of the Annual ACM SIGGRAPH Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH'96). 43--54.

Digital Library

[9]

X. Granier, M. Goesele, W. Heidrich, and H.-P. Seidel. 2003. Interactive visualization of complex real-world light sources. In Proceedings of the Pacific Graphics Conference (PG'03). 59--66.

Digital Library

[10]

G. Greger, P. Shirley, P. M. Hubbard, and D. P. Greenberg. 1998. The irradiance volume. IEEE Comput. Graph. Appl. 18, 2, 32--43.

Digital Library

[11]

T. Hachisuka and H. W. Jensen. 2009. Stochastic progressive photon mapping. ACM Trans. Graph. 28, 5, 141:1--141:8.

Digital Library

[12]

T. Hachisuka, J. Pantaleoni, and H. W. Jensen. 2012. A path space extension for robust light transport simulation. ACM Trans. Graph. 31, 6, 191:1--191:10.

Digital Library

[13]

M. Hasan, J. Krivanek, B. Walter, and K. Bala. 2009. Virtual spherical lights for many-light rendering of glossy scenes. ACM Trans. Graph. 28, 5, 143:1--143:6.

Digital Library

[14]

W. Heidrich, J. Kautz, P. Slusallek, and H.-P. Seidel. 1998. Canned lightsources. In Proceedings of the EUROGRAPHICS Rendering Techniques Workshop (EGRW'98). 293--300.

[15]

IESNA. 2002. IES LM-63-2002, IESNA Standard File Format for the Electronic Transfer of Photometric Data and Related Information. Illuminating Engineering Society of North America.

[16]

W. Jakob. 2010. Mitsuba renderer. www.mitsuba-renderer.org.

[17]

W. Jakob and S. Marschner. 2012. Manifold exploration: A Markov chain Monte Carlo technique for rendering scenes with difficult specular transport. ACM Trans. Graph. 31, 4, 58:1--58:13.

Digital Library

[18]

A. S. Kaplanyan and C. Dachsbacher. 2013. Path space regularization for holistic and robust light transport. Comput. Graph. Forum 32, 2, 63--72.

[19]

S. Kniep, S. Haring, and M. Magnor. 2009. Efficient and accurate rendering of complex light sources. Comput. Graph. Forum 28, 4, 1073--1081.

Digital Library

[20]

E. P. Lafortune and Y. D. Willems. 1993. Bi-directional path tracing. In Proceedings of the Computer Graphics Conference. Vol. 93. 145--153.

[21]

M. Levoy and P. Hanrahan. 1996. Light field rendering. In Proceedings of the Annual ACM SIGGRAPH Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH'96). 31--42.

Digital Library

[22]

A. Mas, I. Martin, and G. Patow. 2008. Compression and importance sampling of near-field light sources. Comput. Graph. Forum 27, 8, 2013--2027.

[23]

J. T. Moon and S. R. Marschner. 2006. Simulating multiple scattering in hair using a photon mapping approach. ACM Trans. Graph. 25, 3, 1067--1074.

Digital Library

[24]

J. T. Moon, B. Walter, and S. Marschner. 2008. Efficient multiple scattering in hair using spherical harmonics. ACM Trans. Graph. 27, 3, 31:1--31:7.

Digital Library

[25]

J. T. Moon, B. Walter, and S. R. Marschner. 2007. Rendering discrete random media using precomputed scattering solutions. In Proceedings of the EUROGRAPHICS Symposium on Rendering Techniques (EGSR'07). J. Kautz and S. Pattanaik, Eds., Eurographics Association, 231--242.

Digital Library

[26]

J. Muschaweck. 2011. What's in a ray set: Moving towards a unified ray set format. In Illumination Optics II, SPIE.

[27]

R. Ramamoorthi. 2009. Precomputation-based rendering. Found. Trends Comput. Graph. Vis. 3, 4, 281--369.

Digital Library

[28]

R. Ramamoorthi and P. Hanrahan. 2001. An efficient representation for irradiance environment maps. In Proceedings of the Annual ACM SIGGRAPH Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH'01). ACM Press, New York, 497--500.

Digital Library

[29]

M. Rea, Ed. 2000. The IESNA Lighting Handbook: Reference and Application, 9^th Ed. Illuminating Engineering Society of North America.

[30]

P. Shirley and K. Chiu. 1997. A low distortion map between disk and square. J. Graph. Tools 2, 3, 45--52.

Digital Library

[31]

P.-P. Sloan, J. Kautz, and J. Snyder. 2002. Precomputed radiance transfer for real-time rendering in dynamic, low-frequency lighting environments. ACM Trans. Graph. 21, 527--536.

Digital Library

[32]

E. Veach and L. Guibas. 1995. Bidirectional estimators for light transport. In Proceedings of the Annual ACM SIGGRAPH Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH'95). 145--167.

[33]

C. Verbeck and D. Greenberg. 1984. A comprehensive light-source description for computer graphics. IEEE Comput. Graph. Appl. 4, 7, 66--75.

Digital Library

[34]

B. Walter, K. Bala, M. Kulkarni, and K. Pingali. 2008. Fast agglomerative clustering for rendering. In Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Interactive Ray Tracing (IRT'08). 81--86.

[35]

B. Walter, S. Fernandez, A. Arbree, K. Bala, M. Donikian, and D. P. Greenberg. 2005. Lightcuts: A scalable approach to illumination. ACM Trans. Graph. 24, 3, 1098--1107.

Digital Library

[36]

B. Walter, S. R. Marschner, H. Li, and K. E. Torrance. 2007. Microfacet models for refraction through rough surfaces. In Proceedings of the Eurographics Symposium on Rendering (EGSR'07). 195--206.

Digital Library

[37]

G. J. Ward. 1994. The RADIANCE lighting simulation and rendering system. In Proceedings of the Annual ACM SIGGRAPH Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH'94). 459--472.

Digital Library

[38]

E. Werness and P. Daniell. 2011. ARB texture compression BPTC. http://www.opengl.org/registry/specs/ARB/texture&lowbar;compression&lowbar;bptc.txt.

Cited By

Zhu JBai YXu ZBako SVelázquez-Armendáriz EWang LSen PHašan MYan L(2021)Neural complex luminairesACM Transactions on Graphics10.1145/3450626.345979840:4(1-12)Online publication date: 19-Jul-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3450626.3459798
Luksch CProst LWimmer M(2020)Real-time Approximation of Photometric Polygonal LightsProceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques10.1145/33845373:1(1-18)Online publication date: 4-May-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3384537
(2019)Dynamic load balance strategy for parallel rendering based on deferred shadingInternational Journal of Computational Science and Engineering10.5555/3337494.333750318:3(286-293)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3337494.3337503
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Complex Luminaires: Illumination and Appearance Rendering
1. Computing methodologies
  1. Computer graphics
    1. Rendering
      1. Ray tracing

Recommendations

Structured importance sampling of environment maps
SIGGRAPH '03: ACM SIGGRAPH 2003 Papers

We introduce structured importance sampling, a new technique for efficiently rendering scenes illuminated by distant natural illumination given in an environment map. Our method handles occlusion, high-frequency lighting, and is significantly faster ...
Interactive global illumination in dynamic scenes
SIGGRAPH '02: Proceedings of the 29th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques

In this paper, we present a system for interactive computation of global illumination in dynamic scenes. Our system uses a novel scheme for caching the results of a high quality pixel-based renderer such as a bidirectional path tracer. The Shading Cache ...
A fast relighting engine for interactive cinematic lighting design
SIGGRAPH '00: Proceedings of the 27th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques

We present new techniques for interactive cinematic lighting design of complex scenes that use procedural shaders. Deep-framebuffers are used to store the geometric and optical information of the visible surfaces of an image. The geometric information ...

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Graphics

ACM Transactions on Graphics Volume 34, Issue 3

April 2015

152 pages

ISSN:0730-0301

EISSN:1557-7368

DOI:10.1145/2774971

Editor:
Kavita Bala
Cornell University

Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2015 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 08 May 2015

Accepted: 01 December 2014

Revised: 01 November 2014

Received: 01 June 2014

Published in TOG Volume 34, Issue 3

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article
Research
Refereed

Funding Sources

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

9
Total Citations
View Citations
1,063
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)12
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)2

Reflects downloads up to 10 Dec 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Zhu JBai YXu ZBako SVelázquez-Armendáriz EWang LSen PHašan MYan L(2021)Neural complex luminairesACM Transactions on Graphics10.1145/3450626.345979840:4(1-12)Online publication date: 19-Jul-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3450626.3459798
Luksch CProst LWimmer M(2020)Real-time Approximation of Photometric Polygonal LightsProceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques10.1145/33845373:1(1-18)Online publication date: 4-May-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3384537
(2019)Dynamic load balance strategy for parallel rendering based on deferred shadingInternational Journal of Computational Science and Engineering10.5555/3337494.333750318:3(286-293)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3337494.3337503
Gruson ARibardière MŠik MVorba JCozot RBouatouch KKřivánek J(2017)A Spatial Target Function for Metropolis Photon TracingACM Transactions on Graphics10.1145/3072959.296309736:4(1)Online publication date: 16-Jul-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3072959.2963097
Blumer ANovák JHabel RNowrouzezahrai DJarosz W(2016)Reduced Aggregate Scattering Operators for Path TracingComputer Graphics Forum10.5555/3151666.315171335:7(461-473)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3151666.3151713
Gamito M(2016)Solid Angle Sampling of Disk and Cylinder LightsComputer Graphics Forum10.5555/3071773.307177735:4(25-36)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3071773.3071777
Gruson ARibardière MŠik MVorba JCozot RBouatouch KKřivánek J(2016)A Spatial Target Function for Metropolis Photon TracingACM Transactions on Graphics10.1145/296309736:1(1-13)Online publication date: 15-Nov-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2963097
Blumer ANovák JHabel RNowrouzezahrai DJarosz W(2016)Reduced Aggregate Scattering Operators for Path TracingComputer Graphics Forum10.1111/cgf.1304335:7(461-473)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2016
https://doi.org/10.1111/cgf.13043
Gamito M(2016)Solid Angle Sampling of Disk and Cylinder LightsComputer Graphics Forum10.1111/cgf.1294635:4(25-36)Online publication date: 27-Jul-2016
https://doi.org/10.1111/cgf.12946

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Article

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Issue’s Table of Contents