Using Levels of Detail to Speedup Radiosity Computation
Abstract
Clustering and partitioning based methods have improved drastically Hierarchic- al Radiosity (HR). The first method reduces the number of links but lacks precision since it does not account precisely for the orientations of the patches, within the emitting and receiving clusters, during the illuminati- on calculation. As for the second approach, it is efficient since it partition- s large environments into 3D cells and emploies ordering strategies that need only a subset of cells for computing illumination at each step of the resolution process. Nevertheless, the computation complexity still remains high when the cells contain many objects of highly detailed geometry. The new HR, described in this paper, brings solutions to these problems by making use of Levels Of Details (LOD) that approximate the geometry of the object surfaces in the scene.