Best methods for scene preview

[spectral]

Hi,

I'm currently looking for a method that :

1) Give interactive preview/visual feedback
2) Approach the final rendering, I need my materials to be near of the final result... this preview method will mainly help to "work on the scene" and in some difficult situation GI algo. take a lot of time before giving feedback

So, I have a lot of ideas.... but will be interested about your experience and councils ?

Thx

[dbz]

Virtual point lights? They can be implemented efficiently in OpenGL and at least for diffuse surfaces the result is very close to path tracing and even often looks better because it doesn't suffer from noise or fireflies. It doesn't support reflective or refractive surfaces but for preview it should be ok.

Maybe have a look at Mitsuba renderer, I think it uses vpl's for preview.

[spectral]

Sure, I have see Mitsuba OpenGL VPL version... but I need something able to "preview" even complex materials... even if approximate !

[spectral]

Here is exactly what I was looking for.... a great study & comparison

http://www.mpi-inf.mpg.de/~ritschel/Papers/GISTAR.pdf

[beason]

So which looks the best to you?

[spectral]

The best ?

First, take a look at the table at the end... there is a good summary.

Also, it depends of your goals...

What I need is a near-interactive method that give high quality results, for this it seems to me that 3 methods looks fine :
- An efficient GPU-based approach for interactive global illumination
- Interactive relighting of dynamic refractive objects
- Parallel progressive photon mapping on GPUs

But I have to experiment them before

[Tristan]

Keep us posted, I'm interested to hear your findings