Parallel Visibility Computations for Parallel Radiosity

The radiosity method models the interaction of light between diffuse reflecting surfaces, thereby accurately predicting global illumination effects. Due to the high computational effort to calculate the transfer of light between surfaces and the memory requirements for the scene description, a distributed, parallelized version of the algorithm is needed for scenes consisting of thousands of surfaces. We present a distributed, parallel progressive radiosity algorithm. Then we parallelize the visibility calculations and analyze the results

Two Optimization Methods for Raytracing

Raytracing is a method to produce photo-realistic pictures. For each pixel of an image one ray is shot to find the object, which determines the color of the pixel. Rays are also used to simulate shadows and reflections. Previously bounding volume hierarchies have been used to speed raytracing. A new method to speed the traversal of a bounding volume hierarchy is presented. Optimisation methods to find the intersection point between the ray and the scene have been introduced previously. A new algorithm based on cylinders is presented also