Dawn Renderer / News: Recent posts

The new project screenshot is the result of the experimental implementation of a pretrace step that allows us to precalculate irradiance caches. This allows for smoother irradiance cache interpolation. Still, the IC algorithm is lacking in smoothness and we will improve this on the short term by implementing irradiance gradients into the cache. These gradients allow the extrapolation of irradiance in the immediate area of the cache. This will enable us to use far lower detail settings to obtain a similarly smooth result, expectedly decreasing render times significantly.

The most important technologies of the dawn renderer, irradiance caching and photon mapping, have been implemented. This allows the user to render full global illumination images. By using photon mapping, adding more light bounces has very little performance impact. The new screenshot in this project has been rendered with final gather and 5 light bounces in 67 seconds on a single core of an Intel 1.73 Core Duo CPU. Future improvement of the irradiance caching algorithm will further reduce render times.