Speeding up global illumination computations using programmable GPUs

In the context of realistic image synthesis, many stochastic methods have been proposed to sample direct and indirect radiance. We present new ways to use hardware graphics to sample direct and indirect lighting in a scene. Jittered sampling of light sources can easily be implemented on a fragment program to obtain soft shadow samples. Using a voxel representation of the scene, indirect illumination can be computed using hemispherical jittered sampling. These algorithms have been implemented in our rendering framework but can be used in other contexts like radiosity or final gathering of the photon map.