Abstract
For simulating the scene with global illumination, ray tracing, which includes the rendering of multi-bounce reflection and refraction, demands heavy computation. Photon mapping provides a two-pass method for efficiently simulating global illumination with ray tracing, which makes the computation of caustics and soft indirect illumination relatively fast. Besides, irradiance cache is a method to further speed up the computation of indirect illumination in a Monte Carlo ray tracer. This paper presents a method that uses the concept of irradiance cache in multi-resolution to cache the irradiance of each light component in photon maps. The presented method not only can make the computation more efficient but also can preserve the details of scene.