Scalable Realistic Rendering with Many-Light Methods

Recent years have seen increasing attention and significant progress in many-light rendering, a class of methods for the efficient computation of global illumination. The many-light formulation offers a unified mathematical framework for the problem reducing the full lighting transport simulation to the calculation of the direct illumination from many virtual light sources. These methods are unrivaled in their scalability: they are able to produce artifact-free images in a fraction of a second but also converge to the full solution over time. In this state-of-the-art report, we have three goals: give an easy-to-follow, introductory tutorial of many-light theory; provide a comprehensive, unified survey of the topic with a comparison of the main algorithms; and present a vision to motivate and guide future research. We will cover both the fundamental concepts as well as improvements, extensions, and applications of many-light rendering.