Localizing the Final Gathering for Dynamic Scenes using the Photon Map

Rendering of high quality animations with global illumination effects is very costly using traditional techniques designed for static scenes. In this paper we present an extension of the photon mapping algorithm to handle dynamic environments. First, for each animation segment the static irradiance cache is computed only once for the scene with all dynamic objects removed. Then, for each frame, the dynamic objects are inserted and the irradiance cache is updated locally in the scene regions whose lighting is strongly affected by the objects. In the remaining scene regions the photon map is used to correct the irradiance values in the static cache. As a result the overall animation rendering efficiency is significantly improved and the temporal aliasing is reduced.