Lattice - Boltzmann Lighting Models

In this chapter, we present a GPU-based implementation of a photon transport model that is particularly effective in global illumination of participating media, including atmospheric geometry such as clouds, smoke, and haze, as well as densely placed, translucent surfaces. The model provides the “perfect” GPU application in the sense that the kernel code can be structured to minimize control flow divergence and yet avoid all memory bank conflicts and uncoalesced accesses to global memory. Thus the speedups over single-core CPU execution are dramatic. Example applications include clouds, plants, and plastics.