High-fidelity 3D assets with materials composed of fibers (including hair), complex layered material shaders, or fine scattering geometry are critical in high-end realistic rendering applications. Rendering such models is computationally expensive due to ...

We propose a real-time path guiding method, Voxel Path Guiding (VXPG), that significantly improves fitting efficiency under limited sampling budget. Our key idea is to use a spatial irradiance voxel data structure across all shading points to guide the ...

Achieving a watercolor look was an important goal for the style of Walt Disney Animation Studios’ “Wish”, and screen space textures were critical for achieving this, for example to convey a sense of the watercolor paper texture. However, using ...

A hallmark capability that defines a renderer as a production renderer is the ability to scale to handle scenes with extreme complexity, including complex illumination cast by a vast number of light sources. In this paper, we present Cache Points, the ...

Differentiable rendering methods promise the ability to optimize various parameters of three-dimensional (3D) scenes to achieve a desired result. However, lighting design has so far received little attention in this field. In this article, we introduce a ...

Spherical Harmonics (SH) have been used widely to represent lighting in games and film. While the quadratic (SH3) and higher order spherical harmonics represent irradiance well, they are expensive to store and evaluate, requiring 27 coefficients per ...

We present fast methods for separating the direct and global illumination components of a scene measured by a camera and illuminated by a light source. In theory, the separation can be done with just two images taken with a high frequency binary ...

This paper presents a new method for computing global illumination in scenes with participating media. The method is based on bidirectional Monte Carlo ray tracing and uses photon maps to increase efficiency and reduce noise. We remove previous ...

We present a new Monte Carlo method for solving the light transport problem, inspired by the Metropolis sampling method in computational physics. To render an image, we generate a sequence of light transport paths by randomly mutating a single current ...

Monte Carlo rendering makes heavy use of mixture sampling and multiple importance sampling (MIS). Previous work has shown that control variates can be used to make such mixtures more efficient and more robust. However, the existing approaches failed to ...

Focal points are fascinating effects that emerge from various constellations, for example when light passes through narrow gaps or when objects are seen through lenses or mirrors. These effects can be challenging to render, as paths need to pass through ...

Ray tracing is an essential operation for realistic image synthesis. The acceleration of ray tracing has been studied for a long period of time because algorithms such as light transport simulations require a large amount of ray tracing. One of the major ...

Reproducing physically-based global illumination (GI) effects has been a long-standing demand for many real-time graphical applications. In pursuit of this goal, many recent engines resort to some form of light probes baked in a precomputation stage. ...

A recent trend in real-time rendering is the utilization of the new hardware ray tracing capabilities. Often, usage of a distance field representation is proposed as an alternative when hardware ray tracing is deemed too costly, and the two are seen as ...

We introduce virtual blue noise lighting, a rendering pipeline for estimating indirect illumination with a blue noise distribution of virtual lights. Our pipeline is designed for virtual lights with non-uniform emission profiles that are more expensive ...

Russian roulette and splitting are widely used techniques to increase the efficiency of Monte Carlo estimators. But, despite their popularity, there is little work on how to best apply them. Most existing approaches rely on simple heuristics based on, ...

As scenes become ever more complex and real-time applications embrace ray tracing, path sampling algorithms that maximize quality at low sample counts become vital. Recent resampling algorithms building on Talbot et al.'s [2005] resampled importance ...

Multiple importance sampling (MIS) is an indispensable tool in light-transport simulation. It enables robust Monte Carlo integration by combining samples from several techniques. However, it is well understood that such a combination is not always more ...

Neural rendering algorithms introduce a fundamentally new approach for photorealistic rendering, typically by learning a neural representation of illumination on large numbers of ground truth images. When training for a given variable scene, such as ...

This paper enhances the voxel-to-voxel radiance shooting, propagation, and scattering algorithm of Max [20]. It reduces the memory requirements by storing the radiance only on the occupied cells of a sparse voxel octree and by sampling only 24 ...${}^{\mathrm{}}$${}^{\mathrm{}}{\mathrm{}}^{\mathrm{}\mathrm{}}$