Hardware-accelerated ambient occlusion computation.
Mirko Sattler, Ralf Sarlette, Gabriel Zachmann, Reinhard Klein · 2004
In this paper, we present a novel, hardware-accelerated approach to compute the visibility be-tween surface points and directional light sources. Thus, our method provides a first-order approxima-tion of the rendering equation in graphics hardware. This is done by accumulating depth tests of ver-tex fragments as seen from a number of light direc-tions. Our method does not need any preprocessing of the scene elements and introduces no memory overhead. Besides of the handling of large polygo-nal models, it is suitable for deformable or animated objects under time-varying high-dynamic range il-lumination at interactive frame rates. 1