A Two-Pass Hardware-Based Method for Hierarchical Radiosity

Finite elements methods for radiosity are aimed at computing global illumination solutions efficiently. However these methods are not suitable for obtaining high quality images due to the lack of error control. Two-pass methods allow to achieve that level of quality computing illumination at each pixel and thus introducing a high computing overhead. We present a two-pass method for radiosity that allows to produce high quality images avoiding most of the per-pixel computations. The method computes a coarse hierarchical radiosity solution and then performs a second pass using current graphics hardware accelerators to generate illumination as high definition textures.