GPU Gems 2: Programming Techniques for High-Performance Graphics and General-Purpose Computation

Chapter 14. Dynamic Ambient Occlusion and Indirect Lighting

Michael BunnellNVIDIA Corporation

In this chapter we describe a new technique for computing diffuse light transfer and show how it can be used to compute global illumination for animated scenes. Our technique is efficient enough when implemented on a fast GPU to calculate ambient occlusion and indirect lighting data on the fly for each rendered frame. It does not have the limitations of precomputed radiance transfer (PRT) or precomputed ambient occlusion techniques, which are limited to rigid objects that do not move relative to one another (Sloan 2002). Figure 14-1 illustrates how ambient occlusion and indirect lighting enhance environment lighting.

The scene on the left uses only environment ...