11 research outputs found
Importance driven environment map sampling
In this paper we present an automatic and efficient method for supporting Image Based Lighting (IBL) for bidirectional methods which improves both the sampling of the environment, and the detection and sampling of important regions of the scene, such as windows and doors. These often have a small area proportional to that of the entire scene, so paths which pass through them are generated with a low probability. The method proposed in this paper improves this by taking into account view importance, and modifies the lighting distribution to use light transport information. This also automatically constructs a sampling distribution in locations which are relevant to the camera position, thereby improving sampling. Results are presented when our method is applied to bidirectional rendering techniques, in particular we show results for Bidirectional Path Tracing, Metropolis Light Transport and Progressive Photon Mapping. Efficiency results demonstrate speed up of orders of magnitude (depending on the rendering method used), when compared to other methods
Reversible Jump Metropolis Light Transport using Inverse Mappings
We study Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods operating in primary sample
space and their interactions with multiple sampling techniques. We observe that
incorporating the sampling technique into the state of the Markov Chain, as
done in Multiplexed Metropolis Light Transport (MMLT), impedes the ability of
the chain to properly explore the path space, as transitions between sampling
techniques lead to disruptive alterations of path samples. To address this
issue, we reformulate Multiplexed MLT in the Reversible Jump MCMC framework
(RJMCMC) and introduce inverse sampling techniques that turn light paths into
the random numbers that would produce them. This allows us to formulate a novel
perturbation that can locally transition between sampling techniques without
changing the geometry of the path, and we derive the correct acceptance
probability using RJMCMC. We investigate how to generalize this concept to
non-invertible sampling techniques commonly found in practice, and introduce
probabilistic inverses that extend our perturbation to cover most sampling
methods found in light transport simulations. Our theory reconciles the
inverses with RJMCMC yielding an unbiased algorithm, which we call Reversible
Jump MLT (RJMLT). We verify the correctness of our implementation in canonical
and practical scenarios and demonstrate improved temporal coherence, decrease
in structured artifacts, and faster convergence on a wide variety of scenes
The Iray Light Transport Simulation and Rendering System
While ray tracing has become increasingly common and path tracing is well
understood by now, a major challenge lies in crafting an easy-to-use and
efficient system implementing these technologies. Following a purely
physically-based paradigm while still allowing for artistic workflows, the Iray
light transport simulation and rendering system allows for rendering complex
scenes by the push of a button and thus makes accurate light transport
simulation widely available. In this document we discuss the challenges and
implementation choices that follow from our primary design decisions,
demonstrating that such a rendering system can be made a practical, scalable,
and efficient real-world application that has been adopted by various companies
across many fields and is in use by many industry professionals today
Efficient Caustic Rendering with Lightweight Photon Mapping
Robust and efficient rendering of complex lighting effects, such as caustics, remains a challenging task. While algorithms like vertex connection and merging can render such effects robustly, their significant overhead over a simple path tracer is not always justified and â as we show in this paper â also not necessary. In current rendering solutions, caustics often require the user to enable a specialized algorithm, usually a photon mapper, and handâtune its parameters. But even with carefully chosen parameters, photon mapping may still trace many photons that the path tracer could sample well enough, or, even worse, that are not visible at all.
Our goal is robust, yet lightweight, caustics rendering. To that end, we propose a technique to identify and focus computation on the photon paths that offer significant variance reduction over samples from a path tracer. We apply this technique in a rendering solution combining path tracing and photon mapping. The photon emission is automatically guided towards regions where the photons are useful, i.e., provide substantial variance reduction for the currently rendered image. Our method achieves better photon densities with fewer light paths (and thus photons) than emission guiding approaches based on visual importance. In addition, we automatically determine an appropriate number of photons for a given scene, and the algorithm gracefully degenerates to pure path tracing for scenes that do not benefit from photon mapping