Occluded environment maps rendering

This master's thesis deals with the issue of real time Global Illumination (GI) in Computer Graphics. The project focused on developing an open source algorithm for real time rendering, based on a Image Based Lighting (IBL) technique called Environment Mapping, and a very common real time shadowing technique called Shadow Mapping. The goal of the algorithm is to achieve photorealistic, interactive and dynamic ambient illumination, given a surrounding represented as an equirectangular panorama high dynamic range image (HDRI), namely an Environment Map (EM). The EM is preprocessed to locate a certain number of light sources (embodied by sets of pixels and a direction), and to generate a collection of new EMs which are used in the rendering process by means of their projection on Spherical Harmonics (SH) basis. For each light source a directional Shadow Map (SM) is computed and used as discriminant in assessing if a given fragment ( pixel ) is lit by the corresponding light source. The set of light sources that lights a fragment is mapped to a generated EM which is employed to compute the pixel's nal color. The presented approach is well suited for outdoor EMs (where usually there is only one natural light source) but it has been primarly designed for indoor EMs (two or more arti cial light sources) since it also o ers a mechanism to switch on and o lights in real time.