Meshless Hierarchical Radiosity on the GPU

Abstract

Meshless radiosity is a radiosity method that is based on a point-based hierarchical discretization of the scene. This better decouples the runtime complexity from the geometric complexity of the scene and allows for an adaptive high-quality simulation of the diffuse global light transport. In this paper, we analyze the bottlenecks of this approach and examine the possibilities for an efficient and parallel implementation of this paradigm on the GPU. We show how by modifying the hierarchical data structures and the computation of the transport operator, a highly efficient GPU-based solution can be achieved which is by orders of magnitude faster and allows to compute highquality global illumination solutions within seconds.