Realistic, Hardware-accelerated Shading and Lighting

Wolfgang Heidrich, Hans-Peter Seidel

Max-Planck-Institute for Computer Science

Saarbrücken, Germany

With fast 3D graphics becoming more and more available even on low end platforms, the focus in hardware-accelerated rendering is beginning to shift towards higher quality rendering and additional functionality instead of simply higher performance implementations based on the traditional graphics pipeline.

In this paper we present techniques for realistic shading and lighting using computer graphics hardware. In particular, we discuss multipass methods for high quality local illumination using physically-based reflection models, as well as techniques for the interactive visualization of non-diffuse global illumination solutions. These results are combined with normal mapping for increasing the visual complexity of rendered images.

Although the techniques presented here work at interactive frame rates on contemporary graphics hardware, the paper also discusses some modifications of the rendering pipeline that help to further improve both performance and quality of the proposed methods.

The full paper can be downloaded as PDF