Efficient potential equation solutions for global illumination computation

The potential equation provides a natural mathematical basis for all the illumination computation methods based on the strategy of shooting light. The particle tracing technique which p h ysically simulates the particle model of light, can also be considered as a general, random walk based solution to the potential equation. As the complexity of the environment increases, the straight forward particle tracing method becomes ineecient. In this paper we discuss diierent biasing methods that could be used to increase the eeciency of the particle tracing process. In particular we present an importance driven scheme in which w e use an approximate potential value as the biasing function for directing a majority of the random walks through regions of importance in the environment, thus eeciently estimating the light ux in these regions. A straight forward simple implementation of this scheme has been carried out and the results that we h a ve obtained show that the scheme is very promising.