The global cube: A hardware-accelerated hierarchical volume radiosity technique
Andreas Hubeli, Lars Lippert, Markus H. Groß · Repository for Publications and Research Data (ETH Zurich) · 1999
In this paper we introduce the notion of the global cube algorithm. Its concept and its implementation allow the computation of the energy transfer of light in a volumetric medium by exploiting graphics hardware. Until now, volumetric radiosity techniques are limited to compute the equilibrium of energy for a maximum of a few tens of thousand volume elements due to the complexity of the underlying computations and the memory requirements. The method we present is accurate, efficient and can be applied to evaluate several million volume elements. We use wavelets to construct a multigrid method which approximates the underlying physical model. Based on a hierarchical model, our method first computes the radiosity distribution for a coarse representation of the volume of interest, then the representation is refined adaptively