T. Davidovic, I. Georgiev, and P. Slusallek

Talk at Siggraph 2012

[bib] [abstract] [presentation]

Abstract: Lightcuts Walter et al. 2005 is an attractive rendering algorithm that efficiently handles complex lighting by adaptively approximating the illumination at a point using clusters of virtual point light (VPL) sources. Two of its limitations are the infinite amount of memory required for variance convergence and the bias introduced by VPL contribution clamping. We present a consistent progressive Lightcuts variant, which converges to the correct solution with a bounded memory footprint. This is essential for high quality rendering, especially considering the tight memory budget on the GPU.