Plausible Visualization of the Dynamic Digital Factory with Massive Amounts of Lights

Abstract

In the last years an enormous progress has been made in improving the visual quality of virtual worlds through approximations of former computationally expensive global illumination (GI) effects. Nevertheless, the handling of dynamic or even deformable content in massive data sets illuminated and shadowed by massive light sources still represents some kind of killer application. Besides the gaming industry, these demands are especially made in digital factory planning applications, where moreover preprocessing times and additional manual preparations of the virtual scenarios have to be avoided to keep a short time to production and accordingly to market. Therefore, we present an efficient rendering pipeline and concept for the creation of a plausible illumination for the digital factory, able to handle dynamic content in massive data sets at a large extent, that are plausibly illuminated and shadowed with a lot of light sources and encoded with high dynamic range information at interactive frame rates in a high resolution. The most important aspects for a visually plausible result are analysed on basis of real images of a factory and at last evaluated with the achieved results. Finally, we give a detailed overview and analysis of the performance of the incorporated techniques on modern graphics hardware to identify the main bottlenecks and key points for future research and conclude with an extensive reflection of the benefits of a plausible illumination for digital factory planning applications.