Fast approximate visibility on the GPU using pre-computed 4D visibility fields

Abstract

We present a novel GPU-based method for accelerating the visibility function computation of the lighting equation in dynamic scenes composed of rigid objects. The method pre-computes, for each object in the scene, the visibility and normal information, as seen from the environment, onto the bounding sphere surrounding the object and encodes it into maps. The visibility function is encoded by a four-dimensional visibility field that describes the distance of the object in each direction for all positional samples on a sphere around the object. In addition, the normal vectors of each object are computed and stored in corresponding fields for the same positional samples for use in the computation of reflection in ray-tracing. Thus we are able to speed up the calculation of most algorithms that trace rays to real-time frame rates. The pre-computation time of our method is relatively small. The space requirements amount to 1 byte per ray direction for the computation of ambient occlusion and soft shadows and 4 bytes per ray direction for the computation of reflection in ray-tracing. We present the acceleration results of our method and show its application to two different intersection intensive domains, ambient occlusion computation and stochastic ray tracing on the GPU.