Efficient Glossy Global Illumination with Interactive Viewing

The ability to perform interactive walkthroughs of global illumination solutions including glossy effects is a challenging open problem. In this paper we overcome certain limitations of previous approaches. We first introduce a novel, memory‐ and compute‐efficient representation of incoming illumination, in the context of a hierarchical radiance clustering algorithm. We then represent outgoing radiance with an adaptive hierarchical basis, in a manner suitable for interactive display. Using appropriate refinement and display strategies, we achieve walkthroughs of glossy solutions at interactive rates for non‐trivial scenes. In addition, our implementation has been developed to be portable and easily adaptable as an extension to existing, diffuse‐only, hierarchical radiosity systems. We present results of the implementation of glossy global illumination in two independent global illumination systems.