The Close Object Buffer: A Sharp Shadow Modelling Technique for Radiosity Methods

Radiosity methods have been using several techniques in order to determine a subdivision of the environment that accurately captures the variations of the radiance field. Most of these techniques use object space approaches to predict the areas of high variation of the radiance. Such methods can be prohibitively expensive to be applied in scenes containing a large number of small ’detail’ objects. An adaptive refinement technique addressing the problem of detail shadow detection has been devised and implemented. The presented technique is able to improve the quality of a radiosity image by rendering detail illumination like sharp shadows at an arbitrary precision with a small time and memory consumption.