Realistic Local Lighting in Dynamic Height Fields (DAEV)

This thesis presents a method to compute soft shadows from environment maps and local light sources on dynamic height fields, extending previous work on height field illumination. While direct illumination in static scenes is very common in video games and 3D applications, real-time global illumination methods supporting dynamic scenes and lights are still an active field of research. In our method, visibility at each receiver point of a height field is determined by the visible horizon, which can be approximated efficiently using a multi-resolution sampling approach. Local light sources are represented by spherical lights and the incident radiance at receiver points is projected into the spherical harmonic basis. Hence, this method produces convincing shadows on dynamic height fields more efficiently than global illumination methods for general geometry.