Real-time Light Animation

Light source animation is a particularly hard field of real-time global illumination algorithms since moving light sources result in drastic illumination changes and make coherence techniques less effective. However, the animation of small (point-like) light sources represents a special but practically very important case, for which the reuse of the results of other frames is possible. This paper presents a fast light source animation algorithm based on the virtual light sources illumination method. The speed up is close to the length of the animation, and is due to reusing paths in all frames and not only in the frame where they were obtained. The possible applications of this algorithm are the lighting design and systems to convey shape and features with relighting.