Real-Time Global Illumination of Deformable Objects

Existing real-time rendering methods for global illumination use precomputation to simplify runtime computations, but constrain scene geometry to be rigid. This constraint greatly restricts the practical application of these techniques to interactive graphics. This research uses a data-driven approach to support real-time rendering of global illumination effects on deformable surfaces under low-frequency diffuse lighting conditions. The approach is viable in situations where the space of potential object deformations is known offline, so that model appearances can be precomputed for a representative set of deformed states. Principal component data reduction of the precomputed appearance data yields a low-dimensional approximation to the complex appearance space. Runtime interpolation of the reduced appearance basis is then used to efficiently approximate the appearance of other model deformations. Real-time performance is achieved by progressively adapting the rank of the approximation. The method may be implemented on commodity programmable graphics hardware, resulting in only minor runtime cost to the CPU.