Deferred voxel shading for real-time global illumination

Computing indirect illumination is a challenging and complex problem for real-time rendering in 3D applications. We present a global illumination approach that computes indirect lighting in real time using a simplified version of the outgoing radiance and the scene stored in voxels. This approach comprehends two-bounce indirect lighting for diffuse, specular and emissive materials. Our voxel structure is based on a directional hierarchical structure stored in 3D textures with mipmapping, the structure is updated in real time utilizing the GPU which enables us to approximate indirect lighting for dynamic scenes. Our algorithm employs a voxel-light pass which calculates voxel direct and global illumination for the simplified outgoing radiance. We perform voxel cone tracing within this voxel structure to approximate different lighting phenomena such as ambient occlusion, soft shadows and indirect lighting. We demonstrate with different tests that our developed approach is capable to compute global illumination of complex scenes on interactive times.