Approximating Dynamic Global Illumination in Image Space
Tobias Ritschel Thorsten Grosch Hans-Peter Seidel
MPI Informatik
Figure 1:
We generalize screen-space ambient occlusion (SSAO) to directional occlusion (SSDO) and one additional diffuse indirect bounce of
light. This scene contains 537k polygons and runs at 20.4 fps at 1600×1200 pixels. Both geometry and lighting can be fully dynamic.
Abstract
Physically plausible illumination at real-time framerates is often
achieved using approximations. One popular example is ambient
occlusion (AO), for which very simple and efficient implementations
are used extensively in production. Recent methods approximate
AO between nearby geometry in screen space (SSAO). The key
observation described in this paper is, that screen-space occlusion
methods can be used to compute many more types of effects than just
occlusion, such as directional shadows and indirect color bleeding.
The proposed generalization has only a small overhead compared to
classic SSAO, approximates direct and one-bounce light transport
in screen space, can be combined with other methods that simulate
transport for macro structures and is visually equivalent to SSAO in
the worst case without introducing new artifacts. Since our method
works in screen space, it does not depend on the geometric complex-
ity. Plausible directional occlusion and indirect lighting effects can
be displayed for large and fully dynamic scenes at real-time frame
rates.
CR Categories:
I.3.7 [COMPUTER GRAPHICS]: Three-
Dimensional Graphics and Realism; I.3.3 [COMPUTER GRAPH-
ICS]: Color, Shading, Shadowing and Texture
Keywords: radiosity, global illumination, constant time
1 Introduction
Real-time global illumination is still an unsolved problem for large
and dynamic scenes. Currently, sufficient frame rates are only
achieved through approximations. One such approximation is ambi-
ent occlusion (AO), which is often used in feature films and computer
games, because of its high speed and simple implementation. How-
ever, AO decouples visibility and illumination, allowing only for
a coarse approximation of the actual illumination. AO typically
displays darkening of cavities, but all directional information of
the incoming light is ignored. We extend recent developments in
screen-space AO towards a more realistic illumination we call screen-
space directional occlusion (SSDO). The present work explains, how
SSDO
• accounts for the direction of the incoming light,
• includes one bounce of indirect illumination,
• complements standard, object-based global illumination and
• requires only minor additional computation time.
This paper is structured as follows: First, we review existing work in
Section 2. In Section 3 we describe our generalizations of ambient
occlusion for the illumination of meso-structures. Section 4 explains
extensions to improve the visual quality. In Section 5 the integration
of our method into a complete global illumination simulation is de-
scribed. We present our results in Section 6, we discuss in Section 7
before concluding in Section 8.
2 Previous Work
Approximating physically plausible illumination at real-time frame-
rates has recently received much attention. Ambient occlusion (AO)
[Cook and Torrance 1981][Zhukov et al
.
1998] is used in production
extensively [Landis 2002] because of its speed, simplicity and ease
of implementation. While physically correct illumination computes
the integral over a product of visibility and illumination for every
direction, AO computes a product of two individual integrals: one
for visibility and one for illumination. For static scenes, AO allows
to pre-compute visibility and store it as a scalar field over the sur-
face (using vertices or textures). Combining static AO and dynamic
lighting using a simple multiplication gives perceptually plausible
[Langer and B
¨
ulthoff 2000] results at high framerates. To account
for dynamic scenes, Kontkanen et al. [2005] introduced AO Fields,
which allow rigid translation and rotation of objects and specialized
solutions for animated characters exist [Kontkanen and Aila 2006].