Abstract:This paper presents a global illumination method combining two well-known techniques: photon mapping and irradiance caching. The photon mapping method has the advantage of being view independent, irradiance caching can quickly calculate indirect light, but the latter is view-dependent. To compute records covering the entire scene, the irradiance caching method has to be run for many cameras. Our method exploits the advantages of these two methods to achieve fast and accurate calculation of global illumination by computing a refined view-independent irradiance cache from a photon map.