A partial papers list has been up on Ke-Sen Huang’s SIGGRAPH Asia 2009 page for a while now, but I was waiting until either the full list was up or an interesting preprint appeared before mentioning it.  Well, the latter has happened – A preprint and video are now available for the paper Micro-Rendering for Scalable, Parallel Final Gathering. It shares many authors (including the first) with one of the most interesting papers from last year’s SIGGRAPH Asia conference, Imperfect Shadow Maps for Efficient Computation of Indirect Illumination.  Last year’s paper proposed a way to efficiently compute indirect shadowing by rendering a very large number of very low-quality shadowmaps, using a coarse point-based scene representation and some clever hole-filling.  This year’s paper extends this occlusion technique to support full global illumination.  Some of the same authors were recently responsible for another notable extension of an occlusion method (SSAO in this case) to global illumination.

RenderAnts: Interactive REYES Rendering on GPUs is another notable paper at SIGGRAPH Asia this year; no preprint yet, but a technical report is available.  A technical report is also available for another interesting paper, Debugging GPU Stream Programs Through Automatic Dataflow Recording and Visualization.

No preprint or technical report, but promising paper titles: Approximating Subdivision Surfaces with Gregory Patches for Hardware Tessellation and Real-Time Parallel Hashing on the GPU.

Looking at this list and last year’s accepted papers, SIGGRAPH Asia seems to be more accepting of real-time rendering papers than the main SIGGRAPH conference.  Combined with the strong courses program, it’s shaping up to be a very good conference this year.