Abstract: Techniques are provided for dividing the work involved in rendering a high quality depiction of a virtual scene between a local device and a cloud-based system in a manner that leverages the computing power of both. Specifically, the client applications request lighting information, from a cloud-based system, for a specific scene/configuration combination to be depicted. The cloud-based system either generates the requested lighting information, or provides it from a cloud-based cache. The local device renders a depiction of the scene/configuration combination based on the lighting information thus obtained from the cloud. The lighting information may be used by the client over multiple frames of the scene, until an event changes the scene/configuration that is being depicted. At that point, the client application may obtain from the cloud a new set of lighting information for the new scene/configuration combination.

Abstract: Techniques are provided for sending a stream of lighting information for a synchronized scene from a cloud-based system to a set of synchronized client applications. Sending the stream includes detecting a series of changes in configuration of lighting for the synchronized scene, and after detecting each change in the series of changes (a) generating, at the cloud-based system, new lighting information that reflects the change; and (b) streaming the new lighting information to the set of synchronized client applications. Each client application in the set of synchronized client applications repeatedly renders updated depictions of the synchronized scene to reflect lighting configuration changes indicated in the stream of lighting information.