Relighting Forest Ecosystems

Real-time cinematic relighting of large, forest ecosystems remains a challenging problem, in that important global illumination effects, such as leaf transparency and inter-object light scattering, are difficult to capture, given tight timing constraints and scenes that typically contain hundreds of millions of primitives. A solution that is based on a lattice-Boltzmann method is suggested. Reflectance, transmittance, and absorptance parameters are taken from measurements of real plants and integrated into a parameterized, dynamic global illumination model. When the model is combined with fast shadow rays, traced on a GPU, near real-time cinematic relighting is achievable for forest scenes containing hundreds of millions of polygons.