Large-Scale Global Illumination at Activision

In this talk, we’ll describe the key techniques behind the large-scale global illumination system in Activision. Part of the SIGGRAPH 2021 Advances in Real-Time Rendering in Games course (http://advances.realtimerendering.com/). We present a new precomputed lighting compression technique that enables high-performance and seamless reconstruction directly from the compressed lighting data. In addition, we’ll discuss visibility-based sampling of precomputed volumetric lighting and describe a practical method for computing constrained spherical harmonics representations. Bio: Ari Silvennoinen is a Fellow Software Engineer at Activision, where he works on graphics technology research and development. Prior to Activision, he obtained a master’s degree from the University of Helsinki and worked on graphics technology at Umbra Software and Remedy Entertainment. His main interests are in global illumination, visibility algorithms and real-time rendering and he has contributions in graphics conferences and journals, including SIGGRAPH, I3D, CGF and EGSR.