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Abstract

This project explores reducing components of realtime 3D global illumination techniques down to a 2D form in order to create a useable 2D global illumination system. The reduced complexity of this 2D system should increase people’s ability to utilise global illumination techniques in games and find improvements faster. A number of realtime global illumination techniques are explored in detail, and their suitability for conversion to 2D is discussed. Current 2D game examples are used to generate requirements for the final 2D lighting system. An artefact is developed that adapts 3D voxel cone tracing techniques to meet the proposed requirements. The artefact is compared to the original requirements and found to meet the vast majority, then profiled to analyse the processing costs of the system. It’s found that the 2D system can reach speeds around 3 times faster than a 3D version while continuing to produce good visual quality. The 2D system has some quirks with processing time increasing with the total area of emissive geometry, but decreasing with the area of occluding geometry. The project overall was a partial success, producing a more accessible platform for global illumination techniques to be experimented with, refined, and improved before attempting to adapt them back to 3D.

Course: Computer Games Technology - BSc (Hons) - C1671

Date Deposited: 2019-11-19

URI/permalink: https://library.port.ac.uk/dissert/dis13445.html