Distributing Monte Carlo Errors as a Blue Noise in Screen Space by Permuting Pixel Seeds Between Frames

International audienceRecent work has shown that distributing Monte Carlo errors as a blue noise in screen space improves the perceptual quality of rendered images. However, obtaining such distributions remains an open problem with high sample counts and high-dimensional rendering integrals. In this paper, we introduce a temporal algorithm that aims at overcoming these limitations. Our algorithm is applicable whenever multiple frames are rendered, typically for animated sequences or interactive applications. Our algorithm locally permutes the pixel sequences (represented by their seeds) to improve the error distribution across frames. Our approach works regardless of the sample count or the dimensionality and significantly improves the images in low-varying screen-space regions under coherent motion. Furthermore, it adds negligible overhead compared to the rendering times

Real-Time Rendering of Glinty Appearances using Distributed Binomial Laws on Anisotropic Grids

In this work, we render in real-time glittery materials caused by discrete flakes on the surface. To achieve this, one has to count the number of flakes reflecting the light towards the camera within every texel covered by a given pixel footprint. To do so, we derive a counting method for arbitrary footprints that, unlike previous work, outputs the correct statistics. We combine this counting method with an anisotropic parameterization of the texture space that reduces the number of texels falling under a pixel footprint. This allows our method to run with both stable performance and 1.5X to 5X faster than the state-of-the-art.Comment: 9 page

Frequency Based Radiance Cache for Rendering Animations

International audienceWe propose a method to render animation sequences with direct distant lighting that only shades a fraction of the total pixels. We leverage frequency-based analyses of light transport to determine shading and image sampling rates across an animation using a samples cache. To do so, we derive frequency bandwidths that account for the complexity of distant lights, visibility, BRDF, and temporal coherence during animation. We finaly apply a cross-bilateral filter when rendering our final images from sparse sets of shading points placed according to our frequency-based oracles (generally < 25% of the pixels, per frame)

5D Covariance Tracing for Efficient Defocus and Motion Blur

The rendering of effects such as motion blur and depth-of-field requires costly 5D integrals. We dramatically accelerate their computation through adaptive sampling and reconstruction based on the prediction of the anisotropy and bandwidth of the integrand. For this, we develop a new frequency analysis of the 5D temporal light-field, and show that first-order motion can be handled through simple changes of coordinates in 5D. We further introduce a compact representation of the spectrum using the co- variance matrix and Gaussian approximations. We derive update equations for the 5 × 5 covariance matrices for each atomic light transport event, such as transport, occlusion, BRDF, texture, lens, and motion. The focus on atomic operations makes our work general, and removes the need for special-case formulas. We present a new rendering algorithm that computes 5D covariance matrices on the image plane by tracing paths through the scene, focusing on the single-bounce case. This allows us to reduce sampling rates when appropriate and perform reconstruction of images with complex depth-of-field and motion blur effects

Bringing an Accurate Fresnel to Real-Time Rendering: a Preintegrable Decomposition

International audienceWe introduce a new approximate Fresnel reflectance model that enables the accurate reproduction of ground-truth reflectance in real-time rendering engines. Our method is based on an empirical decomposition of the space of possible Fresnel curves. It is compatible with the preintegration of image-based lighting and area lights used in real-time engines. Our work permits to use a reflectance parametrization [Gulbrandsen 2014] that was previously restricted to offline rendering

Reparametrization Uniforme de l’Apparence des Matériaux par Redistribution de Densité

Variations of material parameters such as roughness, sheen, etc. do not usually produce visually-uniform changes in rendered images. This might make it detrimental to artistic edition or prefiltering. In this work, we provide a methodology to reparametrize non visuallyuniform parameters, by uniformly distributing the visual changes across the range of parametervalues. For 1D and 2D parameters, our solution boils down to inverting a Cumulative Distribution Function. We provide three concrete applications of this method to reparametrize the complex refractive index, roughness and sheen.Des variations de paramètres de modèles matériaux tels que la ruguosité ne produisent généralement pas de changements qui apparaissent visuellement uniformes en synthèse d’images. Cela a pour conséquence de compliquer le contrôle artistique ainsi que les méthodes de pré-filtrage. Dans ce rapport, nous proposons une méthodologie qui permet de reparamétriser des modèles de matériau en redistribuant de manière uniforme les changements d’apparence en jouant sur les valeurs des paramètres. Pour des paramètres à une ou deux dimensions, notre solution revient à inverser une fonction de distribution cumulative. Nous présentons trois applications concrètes de cette méthode portant sur trois types de paramètres: l’indice de réfraction complexe, la rugosité et les effets de lustre diffus

A Frequency Analysis and Dual Hierarchy for Efficient Rendering of Subsurface Scattering

International audienceBSSRDFs are commonly used to model subsurface light transport in highly scattering media such as skin and marble. Rendering with BSSRDFs requires an additional spatial integration, which can be significantly more expensive than surface-only rendering with BRDFs. We introduce a novel hierarchical rendering method that can mitigate this additional spatial integration cost. Our method has two key components: a novel frequency analysis of subsurface light transport, and a dual hierarchy over shading and illumination samples. Our frequency analysis predicts the spatial and angular variation of outgoing radiance due to a BSSRDF. We use this analysis to drive adaptive spatial BSSRDF integration with sparse image and illumination samples. We propose the use of a dual-tree structure that allows us to simultaneously traverse a tree of shade points (i.e., pixels) and a tree of object-space illumination samples. Our dual-tree approach generalizes existing single-tree accelerations. Both our frequency analysis and the dual-tree structure are compatible with most existing BSSRDF models, and we show that our method improves rendering times compared to the state of the art method of Jensen and Buhler

A Local Frequency Analysis of Light Scattering and Absorption

(presented at SIGGRAPH 2014)International audienceRendering participating media requires significant computation, but the effect of volumetric scattering is often eventually smooth. This article proposes an innovative analysis of absorption and scattering of local light fields in the Fourier domain and derives the corresponding set of operators on the covariance matrix of the power spectrum of the light field. This analysis brings an efficient prediction tool for the behavior of light along a light path in participating media. We leverage this analysis to derive proper frequency prediction metrics in 3D by combining per-light path information in the volume.We demonstrate the use of these metrics to significantly improve the convergence of a variety of existing methods for the simulation of multiple scattering in participating media. First, we propose an efficient computation of second derivatives of the fluence, to be used in methods like irradiance caching. Second, we derive proper filters and adaptive sample densities for image-space adaptive sampling and reconstruction. Third, we propose an adaptive sampling for the integration of scattered illumination to the camera. Finally, we improve the convergence of progressive photon beams by predicting where the radius of light gathering can stop decreasing. Light paths in participating media can be very complex. Our key contribution is to show that analyzing local light fields in the Fourier domain reveals the consistency of illumination in such media and provides a set of simple and useful rules to be used to accelerate existing global illumination methods.Une nouvelle analyse locale de la diffusion et de l'absorption de la lumière dans l'espace de Fourier est combinée avec le tracé de covariance et permet une estimation rapide du contenu fréquentiel local; cette approche permet l'amélioration de nombreux algorithmes de rendu de milieux participants tels que Progressive Photon Beams et l'integration d'effets de diffusion simple et l'échantillonnage et la reconstruction d'effets de simple diffusion simple en espace image

A Data-Driven Paradigm for Precomputed Radiance Transfer

International audienceIn this work, we explore a change of paradigm to build Precomputed Radiance Transfer (PRT) methods in a data-driven way. This paradigm shift allows us to alleviate the difficulties of building traditional PRT methods such as defining a reconstruction basis, coding a dedicated path tracer to compute a transfer function, etc. Our objective is to pave the way for Machine Learned methods by providing a simple baseline algorithm. More specifically, we demonstrate real-time rendering of indirect illumination in hair and surfaces from a few measurements of direct lighting. We build our baseline from pairs of direct and indirect illumination renderings using only standard tools such as Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) to extract both the reconstruction basis and transfer function