Diffuse Global Illumination using Surfels

Abstract

Simulating global illumination is an important part of rendering realistic-looking scenes. Diffuse global illumination is a subset of global illumination which focuses on the diffuse reflections of light. Methods for solving diffuse global illumination usually require either pre-computations of the light or a lot of raycasts every frame. This thesis explores an alternative approach inspired by Global Illumination Based on Surfels to see if it is possible to reduce the number of rays cast each frame while maintaining a similar visual quality as previous methods, thus reducing the computation cost. This exploration was accomplished by implementing the alternative approach and comparing both performance and visual quality results to a pre-existing diffuse global illumination solution. The results show that it is possible to limit number of rays while keeping a similar visual quality, but the implementation as described in the thesis has other computation bottlenecks that end up overriding the gains from reducing number of rays in many cases.