Rendering with Spherical Radiance Transport Maps

In this paper, we propose a real-time method for rendering soft shadows and inter-reflections of dynamic objects under complex illumination. In previous methods, many efforts were taken to acquire occlusion and reflection informations for dynamic scene on the fly, and the result image cannot be generated in real time. In our approach, these informations for each object are pre-computed and stored in well-defined Spherical Radiance Transport Maps (SRTMs). For distant complex illumination such as environment illumination and area light source, we decompose the illumination to several hundred directional lights. In rendering, we search in SRTMs for occlusion info which may cause shadows, and reflection info which may cause inter-reflections. Finally we produce realistic soft shadows and inter-reflections efficiently. Our method is related with but different from previous Pre-computed Radiance Transfer techniques which are only suitable for static scene.