Lumen-Inspired Real-Time Global Illumination

UC Berkeley CS 184/284A · Spring 2025

Jasper Liu, Jinglun Zhang, Junming Chen, and Zihan Liao

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Bunny scene with global illumination and a mirror wall

Proposal Milestone Final Report Final Slides Final Video

About the project

This educational renderer explores signed distance fields, card-based surface caches, radiance caching, and limited-bounce tracing to approximate global illumination at interactive frame rates. It extends the CS 184/284A Homework 3 path tracer and is inspired by ideas behind Unreal Engine 5's Lumen; it is not Epic Games' production implementation and does not run inside Unreal Engine.

The public repository contains reports, presentation links, video, and rendered results. Course-derived source code is preserved separately in a private archive.