Interactive Global Illumination

Ingo Wald	Thomas Kollig
Carsten Benthin	Alexander Keller
Philipp Slusallek

Computer Graphics Group	Numerical Algorithms Group
Saarland University	Kaiserslautern University

Implemented with OpenRT

Download the paper

Some sample videos from the paper

The whole video, all clips taken together
[divx]

[Conference Room]
[Diffuse Room with moving furnature (ERW6)]
[Office]
[Invisible Date]
[Glass Egg with Caustics]

Some sample images from the paper

The following images have been captured online from the screen of our running Interactive Ray Tracing System.
All of these are runnig on our PC cluster consisting of several Dual AthlonMP 1800+ PCs with a standard 100Mbit FastEthernet network. The network is fully switched and has a single GigaBit-uplink to the display server.
Most of the examples run at only 8 nodes, though some (Conference) use up to 12 nodes.

'Interactive Mode' means that at the mentioned frame rate (see title bar of the image) the whole image is completely recomputed from scratch, allowing arbitrary interactions to the scene (changing viewer, moving geometry, moving lights, changing materials and rendering parameters, aso).

'Converged' is the quality that we achieve as soon as the user stops interaction for a few seconds. Then, we automatically start averaging successive images, and increase the quality settings for successive images. As soon as the user starts with a new interaction, the system switches back to 'interactive mode'.