Progressive Point-Based Global Illumination

This paper proposes a progressive point-based global illumination algorithm to render complex scenes with limited time and memory. Our algorithm includes multi passes. The first pass is ray tracing, and the next passes are point cloud generating and point-based rendering passes. The point clouds are generating progressively, so that they can be generated as much as possible, without considering the limitation of the memory. With this method, we can find a proper size of point cloud. Then, we improve standard photon mapping with our progressive point-based global illumination. We progressively generate the point cloud storing indirect illumination computed by photon mapping and then render with point-based method. Our method costs less time than the standard photon mapping, it has higher quality and uses less memory than standard point-based global illumination.