Extending OGRE with Light Propagation Volumes

Abstract

OGRE is a popular open source rendering engine that offers an extensive set of core features. For more advanced rendering techniques, however, the engine must be extended in various ways. The term Global Illumination (GI) is often used to describe both the effects of inter-reflecting light, and the algorithms that achieve them. Normally associated with off-line techniques, such as path tracing, recent years have seen an increase in the number of algorithms that achieve effective approximations of GI, suitable for real-time rendering. Such algorithms are by necessity complex, and to incorporate them into OGRE is a non-trivial task. This thesis examines a number of interesting GI algorithms, and then describes the process of extending OGRE with one of them: Light Propagation Volumes.