Interactive Rendering of Surface Light Fields

Many interactive 3D applications involve capturing, representing and reproducing the appearance of real objects. The surface light field represents the appearance of a solid object under static lighting by sampling the radiance along rays parametrized by surface position and direction. An implementation can represent this data as highresolution surface geometry, coupled with multiple texture maps, each associated with a direction. The representation can be rendered by a multipass algorithm utilizing common graphics hardware. Through careful optimization, it is possible to achieve interactive frame rates using existing implementations of OpenGL. Surface light fields tend to produce higher resolution renderings than similar methods such as the lumigraph, and do not exhibit occlusion ghosts and other artifacts associated with the lumigraph at low sampling rates. Construction and optimization of surface light field data present a number of challenges.