Visibility Maps

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Visibility maps provide an inexact but very fast way to approximate diffuse lighting coming from an environment sphere mapped with an arbitrary image. The basic idea is to use ray tracing to sample the visibility occlusion of a piece of geometry, and encode this information into a texture map that can be reused for quick subsequent rendering. This is the topic of my Technical Sketch for Siggraph '03.

sketch slides
sketch summary
additional notes
animation

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