A Hybrid Ambient Occlusion Technique for Dynamic Scenes

Abstract

In this paper we present a hybrid technique for illuminating a dynamic scene with self shadowing. Our goal is to perform the necessary calculations with real-time or interactive frame rates. The main idea is to split up the self shadowing process into a global and a local part. This separation allows us to choose combinations of completely independent algorithmic approaches. The global part calculates the self shadowing information of the entire scene. Since it has to process the whole scene, it has a high computational cost; however, a coarse approximation can be created in a short time. In contrast the process for the local part deals with fine details, which have local impact on the scene. It only processes a relevant subset of the scene. Finally we present results based on an implementation using a GPU based self shadowing approximation combined with screen space ambient occlusion for solving the local part