“PantaRay: fast ray-traced occlusion caching of massive scenes” by Pantaleoni, Fascione, Hill and Aila

We describe the architecture of a novel system for precomputing sparse directional occlusion caches. These caches are used for accelerating a fast cinematic lighting pipeline that works in the spherical harmonics domain. The system was used as a primary lighting technology in the movie Avatar, and is able to efficiently handle massive scenes of unprecedented complexity through the use of a flexible, stream-based geometry processing architecture, a novel out-of-core algorithm for creating efficient ray tracing acceleration structures, and a novel out-of-core GPU ray tracing algorithm for the computation of directional occlusion and spherical integrals at arbitrary points.

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