Real-Time Global Illumination with Photon Mapping

Indirect lighting, also known as global illumination, is a crucial effect in photorealistic images. While there are a number of effective global illumination techniques based on precomputation that work well with static scenes, including global illumination for scenes with dynamic lighting and dynamic geometry remains a challenging problem. In this chapter, we describe a real-time global illumination algorithm based on photon mapping that evaluates several bounces of indirect lighting without any precomputed data in scenes with both dynamic lighting and fully dynamic geometry. We explain both the pre- and post-processing steps required to achieve dynamic high-quality illumination within the limits of a realtime frame budget.