High Quality Reconstruction and Interactive Tonemapping of Global Illumination Solutions

would be too expensive or even impossible to build physically. To
achieve a high degree of realism in the virtual representation, the
distribution of light in the scene has to be simulated accurately.
Finite Element methods are well established for this purpose, because
they allow interactive walks through the solution, for example in a
virtual reality environment. The quality of such solutions, however,
is not sufficient if single still images are required. Time-consuming
reconstruction steps have been necessary so far to obtain a high
quality image from a Finite Element solution. In this thesis a
reconstruction step is presented which is significantly faster,
because it exploits information from a Hierarchical Radiosity pass. A
three-dimensional grid structure decouples geometry from lighting
information so that highly complex models can be handled. A final tone
mapping step transforms radiance values to values displayable by
output devices. So far, mainly techniques for mapping of still images
have been developed, but of course they are just as necessary for
interactive walkthrough applications, in which several images are
created per second. This talk presents a method to integrate tone
mapping into walkthroughs with only marginal influence on the
framerate.