Accelerating Many-Lights Rendering with Multi-directional Scene Voxelization

Many scenes of interest to computer graphics applications contain a large number of dynamic light sources. Lighting is computationally expensive because it implies solving a visibility problem for every point light source. We present a method for voxel based approximation of the geometry of a scene. The ray is intersected with the approximation to accelerate the visibility determination. The scene geometry is approximated with a 2D array of voxelizations, with one voxelization for each direction from a dense sampling of the 2D space of all possible directions. The ray/scene intersection is approximated using the voxelization whose rows are most closely aligned with the ray. We support dynamic scenes with rigidly moving objects and complex dynamic scenes. The results of our experiments show our method can render scenes containing thousands lights.