Papers session #3, CAD Scalability and Realism on the Web

Physically-based Environment and Area Lighting using Progressive Rendering in WebGL

Abstract. This paper presents a progressive rendering approach that enables rendering of static 3D scenes, lit by physically-based environment and area lights. Multi-frame sampling strategies are used to approximate elaborate lighting that is refined while showing intermediate results to the user. The presented approach enables interactive yet high-quality rendering in the web and runs on a wide range of devices including low-performance hardware such as mobile devices. An open-source implementation of the described techniques using TypeScript and WebGL 2.0 is presented and provided. For evaluation, we compare our rendering results to both a path tracer and a physically-based rasterizer. Our findings show that the approach approximates the lighting and shadowing of the path-traced reference well while being faster than the compared rasterizer.