Interactive Plausible Illumination for the Digital Factory

F.Peschel, F.Scheer, S.Müller

During the recent years many advances have been made in enhancing the visual quality of virtual worlds through image space approximations at interactive or real time frame rates, involving computationally expensive global illumination effects. Most techniques traditionally focus on the gaming industry, since computer games represent the biggest market for the application of 3D computer graphics and have a huge impact on pushing new technologies to a production ready level. For industrial factory planning applications instead, the demands, workflows, processes and tool infrastructures concerning the creation of realistic virtual worlds are different and require specific procedures for the handling. Therefore, we describe our experiences and methods to create a plausible visualization of massive and complex scenes at a large extent with a lot of light sources, also being able to handle dynamic content. The specific requirements are discussed in detail, as well as the process integration and the workflow for an efficient creation and more realistic visualization of digital factory models at interactive rates. An overview of the rendering system concerning the integration of actual rendering techniques, like deferred shading, cascaded and reflective shadow maps, lighting of homogenous participating media or light propagation volumes into an existing virtual reality system is given, regarding a convenient combination of the different methods to obtain an interactive and perceptually convincing result. The paper concludes with a detailed reflection of the benefits of a plausible illumination for digital factory planning applications.