Real-Time Lighting Effects for Consumer-Grade Mobile Graphics Hardware

Developing 3D graphics applications on consumer-grade mobile devices recently leads to a growing research interest. However, the limited computational and memory storage capacity of mobile devices makes it unsuitable to directly apply widely used rendering algorithms such as Precomputed Radiance Transfer algorithms and ray tracing algorithms, which require high computational cost and memory storage to provide visually appealing rendering results. In this paper, we present a framework for real-time rendering lighting effects for consumer-grade mobile devices. Our framework uses the shadow mapping algorithm, Concentric spherical representation, to generate soft shadows and seamless dual paraboloid map mipmap to store shadow maps. By utilizing the advantages of these two algorithms, we can real time render visually appealing soft shadows from multiple omnidirectional light sources for animated models on mobile devices. We also present a method to divide environment map lighting into several omnidirectional light sources, allowing us to use a bunch of shadow maps to approximate the shadows from environment map lighting. The rendering results show that our method can render visually appealing lighting effects, i.e. reflection effects and soft shadows, from the environment map lighting for animated models in real-time on consumer-grade mobile devices.