State of the Art in Global Illumination for Interactive Applications and High-quality Animations

Global illumination algorithms are regarded as computationally intensive. This cost is a practical problem when producing animations or when interactions with complex models are required. Several algorithms have been proposed to address this issue. Roughly, two families of methods can be distinguished. The first one aims at providing interactive feedback for lighting design applications. The second one gives higher priority to the quality of results, and therefore relies on offline computations. Recently, impressive advances have been made in both categories. In this report, we present a survey and classification of the most up-to-date of these methods. ACM CSS: I.3.7 Computer Graphics—Three-Dimensional Graphics and Realism