The Virtual Light Field - Progress
(These images should be viewed on a hi-res monitor. The images may appear dark because of different properties of displays).
From This ...
The original implementation of the method resulted in some 'rough' pictures, which nevertheless soaked up Gbytes of memory. For example:
This
was created with the original method.
It shows a spherical light, a simple object made of spheres in a room with walls which are a mixture of diffuse and specularly reflecting surfaces.
It shows that there is some 'global illumination' at work -
 | the shadows |
| the reflections |
| the caustic pattern on the walls. |
The image is poor, and used about 1Gb of memory.
It is viewed through a virtual convex lens.
To This ...
The
image resolution can be high (these are only 256*256).
The memory requirement is low. Here the the total light field is about 400MB, however, this need never all be in memory for pin-hole camera rendering, and experiments have shown that these can be compressed down to about 2% of their original size.
During the construction of the light field the total memory requirement is about 60MB.
This scene consists only of diffusely reflecting materials.
Click on the image for more examples.
This
is a similar scene with the right wall changed to include some specular
reflections.
A reflection of the box can be seen in the right wall, which also reflects the light source.
Click on the image for more examples.
