Hierarchical radiosity with multiresolution meshes
Andrew James Willmott, Paul S. Heckbert · 2000
The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the National Science Foundation or the United States government. Keywords: global illumination, hierarchical radiosity, face cluster hierarchies, multiresolution The hierarchical radiosity algorithm solves for the global transfer of diffuse illumination in a scene. While its potential algorithmic complexity is superior to both previous radiosity methods and distributed ray tracing, for scenes containing detailed polygonal models, or highly tessellated curved surfaces, its time performance and memory consumption are less than ideal. My thesis is that by using hierarchies similar to those of multiresolution models, the performance of the hierarchical radiosity algorithm can be made sublinear in the number of input polygons, and thus make radiosity on scenes containing detailed models tractable. The underlying goal of my thesis work has been to make high-speed radiosity solutions possible with such scenes. To achieve this goal, a new face clustering technique for automatically partitioning polygonal models has been developed. The face clusters produced