Real-Time Lighting Effects Using Deferred Shading

In this book we present a real-time rendering system that displays realistic images at interactive frame rates on OpenGL 3 capable hardware while utilizing the power of the GPU. Our system does not rely on any kind of pre-computation and can display fully-dynamic scenes with animated lights and objects. The core of our system is a Deferred Shading pipeline, a typical pipeline used by modern video games. Our system performs HDR rendering and allows various tone-mapping operators to enhance the visual quality of output images. We also allow lights to cast shadows, which is done with the help of Shadow Mapping. Since Deferred Shading does not directly support rendering of transparent objects, we use the Stencil Routed A-Buffer for rendering of transparent objects. The system is open for extension and thanks to increasing GPU speeds is a viable option for real-time display.