Voxel cone tracing (interactive indirect lighting)

[Bumpyride]

A new interactive indirect illumination technique using voxel cone tracing. As I understand it the voxel octree is traversed using a approximate cone tracing where different mip style representations of the scene are used depending on the cone's area at each level. It looks quite fast and really impressive (especially the specular lighting capabilities shown in the videos).

http://blog.icare3d.org/2011/06/interactive-indirect-illumination-and.html

Apparently they'll be presenting it at SIGGRAPH.

 

[Davros]

so the level is still polygons - yes ?

 

[fellix]

so the level is still polygons - yes ?

Yep.
But the voxel "overlay" is still a challenge to process. Traversing dynamic data structures is quite demanding for GPUs, even for a mighty beast like Fermi with its coherent L2 cache.

 

[Bumpyride]

Yep.
But the voxel "overlay" is still a challenge to process. Traversing dynamic data structures is quite demanding for GPUs, even for a mighty beast like Fermi with its coherent L2 cache.

That's why I see the cone-tracing optimization as a clever approximation. It reduces the amount of scene traversal needed pretty elegantly.

Also, building a voxelized scene proxy can be done surprisingly quickly (a few milliseconds):

http://research.nvidia.com/sites/default/files/publications/voxel-pipe.pdf