More Courses
Aug 6th, 2007 by Naty
I went to the “Practical Global Illumination With Irradiance Caching” course. I’m interested in irradiance and radiance caching techniques because they are closely related to baked lighting techniques used in games - one could argue that baked lighting is nothing more than irradiance caching computed offline and applied to interactive renders. An example of a previous paper on this topic with interesting applications for baked lighting is “An Approximate Global Illumination System for Computer Generated Films” by Tabellion and Lamorlette (SIGGRAPH 2004).
Anyway, the course included a presentation on the original radiance caching paper (it was called something else back then) from 1988 by Greg Ward (who also received a well-deserved Computer Graphics Achievement Award today), as well as presentations on more recent developments by Jaroslav Krivanek, Henrik Wann Jensen, Pascal Gautron and Okan Arikan. Krivanek’s radiance caching work for glossy surfaces sounded potentially interesting for baked lighting but used too many SH coefficients to be practical for games. Greg Ward did mention a method of applying rotation gradients of irradiance to bump maps which sounded worth investigating further.
I skipped out on Okan Arikan’s section at the end to see the real-time synthesis section of the “Example-Based Texture Synthesis” course (course notes are available here). The tile-based methods are something I have been keeping an eye on for a while for possible game applications so I was happy to hear more about the latest work on those. There were also some pixel-based synthesis techniques which appeared too slow for real time but perhaps just right for doing at level loading time.
This afternoon I went to Hanan Samet’s spatial data structures course. The course was so full that they had to open up an overflow room, which almost filled up as well! Hanan presented a bunch of interesting data structures (I never knew there were so many different kinds of quadtrees) and algorithms. I now really want to read his new book (“Foundations of Multidimensional and Metric Data Structures”) which I bought last year but haven’t gotten around to reading yet (I feel bad about that, especially since Hanan was kind enough to sign my copy).