We present new techniques for interactive cinematic lighting design of complex scenes that use procedural shaders. Deep-framebuffers are used to store the geometric and optical information of the visible surfaces of an image. The geometric information is represented as collections of oriented points, and the optical information is represented as bi-directional reflection distribution functions, or BRDFs. The BRDFs are generated by procedurally defined surface texturing functions that spatially vary the surfaces' appearances.The deep-framebuffer information is rendered using a multi-pass algorithm built on the OpenGL graphics pipeline. In order to handle both physically-correct as well as non-realistic reflection models used in the film industry, we factor the BRDF into independent components that map onto both the lighting and texturing units of the graphics hardware. A similar factorization is used to control the lighting distribution. Using these techniques, lighting calculations can be evaluated 2500 times faster than previous methods. This allows lighting changes to be rendered at rates of 20Hz in static environments that contain millions of objects of with dozens of unique procedurally defined surface properties and scores of lights.

Simulating realistic lighting and rendering complex scenes are usually considered separate problems with incompatible solutions. Accurate lighting calculations are typically performed using ray tracing algorithms, which require that the entire scene database reside in memory to perform well. Conversely, most systems capable of rendering complex scenes use scan-conversion algorithms that access memory coherently, but are unable to incorporate sophisticated illumination. We have developed algorithms that use caching and lazy creation of texture and geometry to manage scene complexity. To improve cache performance, we increase locality of reference by dynamically reordering the rendering computation based on the contents of the cache. We have used these algorithms to compute images of scenes containing millions of primitives, while storing ten percent of the scene description in memory. Thus, a machine of a given memory capacity can render realistic scenes that are an order of magnitude more complex than was previously possible.

In this paper we discuss the efficient and accurate incorporation of texture maps into a hierarchical Galerkin radiosity algorithm. This extension of the standard algorithm allows the use of textures to describe complex reflectance and emittance patterns over surfaces, increasing the realism and complexity of radiosity images. Previous approaches to the inclusion of textures have either averaged the texture to yield a single color for the radiosity computations, or exhaustively generated detail elements—possibly as many as one per texture pixel. The former does not capture important lighting effects due to textures, while the latter is too expensive computationally to be practical.

We present an algorithm for incrementally including may-alias information into Static Single Assignment form by computing a sequence of increasingly precise (and correspondingly larger) partial SSA forms. Our experiments show significant speedup of our method over exhaustive use of may-alias information, as optimization problems converge well before most may-aliases are needed.