A Monte Carlo method for accelerating the computation of animated radiosity sequences

Realistic rendering animation is known to be an expensive processing task when physically-based global illumination methods are used in order to improve illumination details. This paper presents an acceleration technique to compute animations in radiosity environments. The technique is based on an interpolated approach that exploits temporal coherence in radiosity. A fast global Monte Carlo pre-processing step is introduced to the whole computation of the animated sequence to select important frames. These are fully computed and used as a base for the interpolation of all the sequence. The approach is completely view-independent. Once the illumination is computed, it can be visualized by any animated camera. Results present significant high speed-ups showing that the technique could be an interesting alternative to deterministic methods for computing non-interactive radiosity animations for moderately complex scenario

Hardware Acceleration of Progressive Refinement Radiosity using Nvidia RTX

A vital component of photo-realistic image synthesis is the simulation of indirect diffuse reflections, which still remain a quintessential hurdle that modern rendering engines struggle to overcome. Real-time applications typically pre-generate diffuse lighting information offline using radiosity to avoid performing costly computations at run-time. In this thesis we present a variant of progressive refinement radiosity that utilizes Nvidia's novel RTX technology to accelerate the process of form-factor computation without compromising on visual fidelity. Through a modern implementation built on DirectX 12 we demonstrate that offloading radiosity's visibility component to RT cores significantly improves the lightmap generation process and potentially propels it into the domain of real-time.Comment: 114 page

Efficient From-Point Visibility for Global Illumination in Virtual Scenes with Participating Media

Sichtbarkeitsbestimmung ist einer der fundamentalen Bausteine fotorealistischer Bildsynthese. Da die Berechnung der Sichtbarkeit allerdings äußerst kostspielig zu berechnen ist, wird nahezu die gesamte Berechnungszeit darauf verwendet. In dieser Arbeit stellen wir neue Methoden zur Speicherung, Berechnung und Approximation von Sichtbarkeit in Szenen mit streuenden Medien vor, die die Berechnung erheblich beschleunigen, dabei trotzdem qualitativ hochwertige und artefaktfreie Ergebnisse liefern

Interactive global illumination on the CPU

Computing realistic physically-based global illumination in real-time remains one of the major goals in the fields of rendering and visualisation; one that has not yet been achieved due to its inherent computational complexity. This thesis focuses on CPU-based interactive global illumination approaches with an aim to develop generalisable hardware-agnostic algorithms. Interactive ray tracing is reliant on spatial and cache coherency to achieve interactive rates which conflicts with needs of global illumination solutions which require a large number of incoherent secondary rays to be computed. Methods that reduce the total number of rays that need to be processed, such as Selective rendering, were investigated to determine how best they can be utilised. The impact that selective rendering has on interactive ray tracing was analysed and quantified and two novel global illumination algorithms were developed, with the structured methodology used presented as a framework. Adaptive Inter- leaved Sampling, is a generalisable approach that combines interleaved sampling with an adaptive approach, which uses efficient component-specific adaptive guidance methods to drive the computation. Results of up to 11 frames per second were demonstrated for multiple components including participating media. Temporal Instant Caching, is a caching scheme for accelerating the computation of diffuse interreflections to interactive rates. This approach achieved frame rates exceeding 9 frames per second for the majority of scenes. Validation of the results for both approaches showed little perceptual difference when comparing against a gold-standard path-traced image. Further research into caching led to the development of a new wait-free data access control mechanism for sharing the irradiance cache among multiple rendering threads on a shared memory parallel system. By not serialising accesses to the shared data structure the irradiance values were shared among all the threads without any overhead or contention, when reading and writing simultaneously. This new approach achieved efficiencies between 77% and 92% for 8 threads when calculating static images and animations. This work demonstrates that, due to the flexibility of the CPU, CPU-based algorithms remain a valid and competitive choice for achieving global illumination interactively, and an alternative to the generally brute-force GPU-centric algorithms

GPU-Based Global Illumination Using Lightcuts

Global Illumination aims to generate high quality images. But due to its highrequirements, it is usually quite slow. Research documented in this thesis wasintended to offer a hardware and software combined acceleration solution toglobal illumination. The GPU (using CUDA) was the hardware part of the wholemethod that applied parallelism to increase performance; the “Lightcuts”algorithm proposed by Walter (2005) at SIGGRAPH 2005 acted as the softwaremethod. As the results demonstrated in this thesis, this combined method offersa satisfactory performance boost effect for relatively complex scenes

A parallel progressive radiosity algorithm based on patch data circulation

Cataloged from PDF version of article.Current research on radiosity has concentrated on increasing the accuracy and the speed of the solution. Although algorithmic and meshing techniques decrease the execution time, still excessive computational power is required for complex scenes. Hence, parallelism can be exploited for speeding up the method further. This paper aims at providing a thorough examination of parallelism in the basic progressive refinement radiosity, and investigates its parallelization on distributed-memory parallel architectures. A synchronous scheme, based on static task assignment, is proposed to achieve better coherence for shooting patch selections. An efficient global circulation scheme is proposed for the parallel light distribution computations, which reduces the total volume of concurrent communication by an asymptotical factor. The proposed parallel algorithm is implemented on an Intel's iPSC/2 hypercube multicomputer. Load balance qualities of the proposed static assignment schemes are evaluated experimentally. The effect of coherence in the parallel light distribution computations on the shooting patch selection sequence is also investigated. Theoretical and experimental evaluation is also presented to verify that the proposed parallelization scheme yields equally good performance on multicomputers implementing the simplest (e.g. ring) as well as the richest (e.g. hypercube) interconnection topologies. This paper also proposes and presents a parallel load re-balancing scheme which enhances our basic parallel radiosity algorithm to be usable in the parallelization of radiosity methods adopting adaptive subdivision and meshing techniques. (C) 1996 Elsevier Science Lt

Efficient Many-Light Rendering of Scenes with Participating Media

We present several approaches based on virtual lights that aim at capturing the light transport without compromising quality, and while preserving the elegance and efficiency of many-light rendering. By reformulating the integration scheme, we obtain two numerically efficient techniques; one tailored specifically for interactive, high-quality lighting on surfaces, and one for handling scenes with participating media

Physics Of Eclipsing Binaries. II. Towards the Increased Model Fidelity

The precision of photometric and spectroscopic observations has been systematically improved in the last decade, mostly thanks to space-borne photometric missions and ground-based spectrographs dedicated to finding exoplanets. The field of eclipsing binary stars strongly benefited from this development. Eclipsing binaries serve as critical tools for determining fundamental stellar properties (masses, radii, temperatures and luminosities), yet the models are not capable of reproducing observed data well either because of the missing physics or because of insufficient precision. This led to a predicament where radiative and dynamical effects, insofar buried in noise, started showing up routinely in the data, but were not accounted for in the models. PHOEBE (PHysics Of Eclipsing BinariEs; http://phoebe-project.org) is an open source modeling code for computing theoretical light and radial velocity curves that addresses both problems by incorporating missing physics and by increasing the computational fidelity. In particular, we discuss triangulation as a superior surface discretization algorithm, meshing of rotating single stars, light time travel effect, advanced phase computation, volume conservation in eccentric orbits, and improved computation of local intensity across the stellar surfaces that includes photon-weighted mode, enhanced limb darkening treatment, better reflection treatment and Doppler boosting. Here we present the concepts on which PHOEBE is built on and proofs of concept that demonstrate the increased model fidelity.Comment: 60 pages, 15 figures, published in ApJS; accompanied by the release of PHOEBE 2.0 on http://phoebe-project.or

Fast hierarchical low-rank view factor matrices for thermal irradiance on planetary surfaces

We present an algorithm for compressing the radiosity view factor model commonly used in radiation heat transfer and computer graphics. We use a format inspired by the hierarchical off-diagonal low rank format, where elements are recursively partitioned using a quadtree or octree and blocks are compressed using a sparse singular value decomposition -- the hierarchical matrix is assembled using dynamic programming. The motivating application is time-dependent thermal modeling on vast planetary surfaces, with a focus on permanently shadowed craters which receive energy through indirect irradiance. In this setting, shape models are comprised of a large number of triangular facets which conform to a rough surface. At each time step, a quadratic number of triangle-to-triangle scattered fluxes must be summed; that is, as the sun moves through the sky, we must solve the same view factor system of equations for a potentially unlimited number of time-varying righthand sides. We first conduct numerical experiments with a synthetic spherical cap-shaped crater, where the equilibrium temperature is analytically available. We also test our implementation with triangle meshes of planetary surfaces derived from digital elevation models recovered by orbiting spacecrafts. Our results indicate that the compressed view factor matrix can be assembled in quadratic time, which is comparable to the time it takes to assemble the full view matrix itself. Memory requirements during assembly are reduced by a large factor. Finally, for a range of compression tolerances, the size of the compressed view factor matrix and the speed of the resulting matrix vector product both scale linearly (as opposed to quadratically for the full matrix), resulting in orders of magnitude savings in processing time and memory space.Comment: 21 pages, 10 figure