Just Blur and Add Noise
All of the hoopla regarding the game LittleBigPlanet has reminded me of the excellent talk that Alex Evans, co-founder of game creator Media Molecule, gave last year at the Advanced Real-time Rendering for 3D Games course at SIGGRAPH 2006. There are good presentation slides in PDF form at the ATI Developer site: here. If you look at the slide pictures you can see early renders of LittleBigPlanet characters, with unfortunate spheres places on their heads so as not to spoil the game (this was about nine months before the game was announced).
Anyway, he discusses a few techniques that he tried in achieving global illumination-like effects in a “small world” type of environment, all of which were implemented on a Radeon mobility 9800; nothing is too high tech.
Level of Detail 
Iñigo Quílez explains Slisesix demo « Level of Detail said,
September 25, 2008 at 10:35 am
[…] are implicit in the representation. Alex Evans talked about using this type of technique ( see Just Blur and Add Noise) but in his proposed implementation the distance field came from rasterizing geometry into slices […]
Real-Time Rendering » Blog Archive » Interesting bits said,
October 2, 2008 at 11:49 pm
[…] occlusion approximation. Definitely check out all the links: Alex Evan (of LittleBIGPlanet) has a worthwhile talk, and Iñigo’s presentation is even better: good technical content and real-time programs […]
Iñigo Quílez explains Slisesix demoJeremy Shopf said,
August 5, 2013 at 10:26 pm
[…] are implicit in the representation. Alex Evans talked about using this type of technique ( see Just Blur and Add Noise) but in his proposed implementation the distance field came from rasterizing geometry into slices […]