Parallel Visibility Computations for Parallel Radiosity

Abstract

The radiosity method models the interaction of light between diffuse reflecting surfaces, thereby accurately predicting global illumination effects. Due to the high computational effort to calculate the transfer of light between surfaces and the memory requirements for the scene description, a distributed, parallelized version of the algoritm is needed for scenes consisting of thousands of surfaces. We present a distributed, parallel radiosity algoritm, which can subdivide the surface adaptively. Aditionally we present a scheme for paralel visibility calculations. Adaptive load redistribution is also discussed.