Rendering apparatus and method for real-time global illumination in real light environment

A rendering apparatus for real-time global illumination comprising:

• a spherical harmonic processing means for creating light samples as light directions for omni-direction, and creating spherical harmonics basis functions for each of the light samples;
• a light model processing means for transforming light information including radiance of a high dynamic range imaging (HDRI) image to spherical harmonics light coefficients using the spherical harmonic basis functions;
• a radiance transfer processing means for previously calculating coefficients of a visibility and a geometric term for a global illumination model using the spherical harmonic basis function, where the coefficients of the visibility and the geometric term denote transfer-characteristics of the light information including radiance;
• a bidirectional reflectance distributed function (BRDF) processing means for generating a database of BRDF data which is information about reflectance characteristics of an object's surface and calculating coefficients of the BRDF data through smoothing;
• and
• a rendering means for rendering the spherical harmonic light coefficients, the coefficients for the visibility and the geometric term, and the BRDF data coefficient using a rendering equation expressed as a dot product of a vector.