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Item Next Event Estimation++: Visibility Mapping for Efficient Light Transport Simulation(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2020) Guo, Jerry Jinfeng; Eisemann, Martin; Eisemann, Elmar; Eisemann, Elmar and Jacobson, Alec and Zhang, Fang-LueMonte-Carlo rendering requires determining the visibility between scene points as the most common and compute intense operation to establish paths between camera and light source. Unfortunately, many tests reveal occlusions and the corresponding paths do not contribute to the final image. In this work, we present next event estimation++ (NEE++): a visibility mapping technique to perform visibility tests in a more informed way by caching voxel to voxel visibility probabilities. We show two scenarios: Russian roulette style rejection of visibility tests and direct importance sampling of the visibility. We show applications to next event estimation and light sampling in a uni-directional path tracer, and light-subpath sampling in Bi-Directional Path Tracing. The technique is simple to implement, easy to add to existing rendering systems, and comes at almost no cost, as the required information can be directly extracted from the rendering process itself. It discards up to 80% of visibility tests on average, while reducing variance by ~20% compared to other state-of-the-art light sampling techniques with the same number of samples. It gracefully handles complex scenes with efficiency similar to Metropolis light transport techniques but with a more uniform convergence.Item EMCA: Explorer of Monte Carlo based Algorithms(The Eurographics Association, 2021) Ruppert, Lukas; Kreisl, Christoph; Blank, Nils; Herholz, Sebastian; Lensch, Hendrik P. A.; Andres, Bjoern and Campen, Marcel and Sedlmair, MichaelDebugging or analyzing the performance of global illumination algorithms is a challenging task due to the complex path-scene interaction and numerous places where errors and programming bugs can occur. We present a novel, lightweight visualization tool to aid in the understanding of global illumination and the debugging of rendering frameworks. The tool provides detailed information about intersections and light transport paths. Users can add arbitrary data of their choosing to each intersection, based on their specific demands. Aggregate plots allow users to quickly discover and select outliers for further inspection across the globally linked visualization views. That information is further coupled with 3D visualization of the scene where additional aggregated information on the surfaces can be inspected in false colors. These include 3D heat maps such as the density of intersections as well as more advanced colorings such as a diffuse transport approximation computed from local irradiance samples and diffuse material approximations. The necessary data for the 3D coloring is collected as a side-product of quickly rendering the image at low sample counts without significantly slowing down the rendering process. It requires almost no precomputation and very little storage compared to point cloud-based approaches. We present several use cases of how novices and advanced rendering researchers can leverage the presented tool to speed up their research.Item Ray/Ribbon Intersections(ACM Association for Computing Machinery, 2022) Reshetov, Alexander; Josef Spjut; Marc Stamminger; Victor ZordanWe present a new ray tracing primitive-a curved ribbon, which is embedded inside a ruled surface. We describe two such surfaces. Ribbons inside doubly ruled bilinear patches can be intersected by solving a quadratic equation. We also consider a singly ruled surface with a directrix defined by a quadratic Bézier curve and a generator-by two linearly interpolated bitangent vectors. Intersecting such a surface requires solving a cubic equation, but it provides more fine-tuned control of the ribbon shape. These two primitives are smooth, composable, and allow fast non-iterative intersections. These are the first primitives that possess all such properties simultaneously.Item Neural Intersection Function(The Eurographics Association, 2023) Fujieda, Shin; Kao, Chih Chen; Harada, Takahiro; Bikker, Jacco; Gribble, ChristiaanThe ray casting operation in the Monte Carlo ray tracing algorithm usually adopts a bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) to accelerate the process of finding intersections to evaluate visibility. However, its characteristics are irregular, with divergence in memory access and branch execution, so it cannot achieve maximum efficiency on GPUs. This paper proposes a novel Neural Intersection Function based on a multilayer perceptron whose core operation contains only dense matrix multiplication with predictable memory access. Our method is the first solution integrating the neural network-based approach and BVH-based ray tracing pipeline into one unified rendering framework. We can evaluate the visibility and occlusion of secondary rays without traversing the most irregular and time-consuming part of the BVH and thus accelerate ray casting. The experiments show the proposed method can reduce the secondary ray casting time for direct illumination by up to 35% compared to a BVH-based implementation and still preserve the image quality.Item Temporal Sample Reuse for Next Event Estimation and Path Guiding for Real-Time Path Tracing(The Eurographics Association, 2020) Dittebrandt, Addis; Hanika, Johannes; Dachsbacher, Carsten; Dachsbacher, Carsten and Pharr, MattGood importance sampling is crucial for real-time path tracing where only low sample budgets are possible. We present two efficient sampling techniques tailored for massively-parallel GPU path tracing which improve next event estimation (NEE) for rendering with many light sources and sampling of indirect illumination. As sampling densities need to vary spatially, we use an octree structure in world space and introduce algorithms to continuously adapt the partitioning and distribution of the sampling budget. Both sampling techniques exploit temporal coherence by reusing samples from the previous frame: For NEE we collect sampled, unoccluded light sources and show how to deduplicate, but also diffuse this information to efficiently sample light sources in the subsequent frame. For sampling indirect illumination, we present a compressed directional quadtree structure which is iteratively adapted towards high-energy directions using samples from the previous frame. The updates and rebuilding of all data structures takes about 1ms in our test scenes, and adds about 6ms at 1080p to the path tracing time compared to using state-of-the-art light hierarchies and BRDF sampling. We show that this additional effort reduces noise in terms of mean squared error by at least one order of magnitude in many situations.Item World-Space Spatiotemporal Path Resampling for Path Tracing(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2023) Zhang, Hangyu; Wang, Beibei; Chaine, Raphaëlle; Deng, Zhigang; Kim, Min H.With the advent of hardware-accelerated ray tracing, more and more real-time rendering applications tend to render images with ray-traced global illumination (GI). However, the low sample counts at real-time framerates bring enormous challenges to existing path sampling methods. Recent work (ReSTIR GI) samples indirect illumination effectively with a dramatic bias reduction. However, as a screen-space based path resampling approach, it can only reuse the path at the first bounce and brings subtle benefits for complex scenes. To this end, we propose a world-space based spatiotemporal path resampling approach. Our approach caches more path samples into a world-space grid, which allows reusing sub-path starting from non-primary path vertices. Furthermore, we introduce a practical normal-aware hash grid construction approach, providing more efficient candidate samples for path resampling. Eventually, our method achieves improvements ranging from 16.6% to 41.9% in terms of mean squared errors (MSE) compared against the previous method with only 4.4% ~ 8.4% extra time cost.Item Correlation-Aware Multiple Importance Sampling for Bidirectional Rendering Algorithms(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2021) Grittmann, Pascal; Georgiev, Iliyan; Slusallek, Philipp; Mitra, Niloy and Viola, IvanCombining diverse sampling techniques via multiple importance sampling (MIS) is key to achieving robustness in modern Monte Carlo light transport simulation. Many such methods additionally employ correlated path sampling to boost efficiency. Photon mapping, bidirectional path tracing, and path-reuse algorithms construct sets of paths that share a common prefix. This correlation is ignored by classical MIS heuristics, which can result in poor technique combination and noisy images.We propose a practical and robust solution to that problem. Our idea is to incorporate correlation knowledge into the balance heuristic, based on known path densities that are already required for MIS. This correlation-aware heuristic can achieve considerably lower error than the balance heuristic, while avoiding computational and memory overhead.Item A Rendering Method of Microdisplay Image to Expand Pupil Movable Region without Artifacts for Lenslet Array Near-Eye Displays(The Eurographics Association, 2022) Ye, Bi; Fujimoto, Yuichiro; Sawabe, Taishi; Kanbara, Masayuki; Lugtenberg, Geert; Kato, Hirokazu; Hideaki Uchiyama; Jean-Marie NormandNear-eye displays (NEDs) with lenslet array (LA) are a technological advancement that generates a virtual image in the observer's field of view (FOV). Although this technology is useful for designing lightweight NEDs, undesirable artifacts (i.e., cross-talk) occur when the user's pupil becomes larger than the pupil practical movable region (PPMR) or moves out of the PPMR. We proposed a rendering method for microdisplay images that takes pupil size into account and included the idea of pupil margin in the ray tracing process. Ray lights emitted by one microdisplay pixel (MP) enter the pupil and pupil margin area after passing through a number of lenses. Each lens at the MP corresponds to one virtual pixel (VP) on the virtual image plane. The weight of each VP is the intersection area between the ray light column and the pupil and pupil margin divided by the sum of intersecting spaces between all the ray light columns generated by the MP and the pupil and pupil margin. The value of each MP is determined by the number of VPs and the related weight. Through retina image simulation studies, we confirmed that the proposed rendering approach substantially enlarges PPMR to accommodate large pupil diameters and wide transition distances while reducing eye relief to an optimal (sunglasses) distance.Item Real-time Neural Rendering of Dynamic Light Fields(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2024) Coomans, Arno; Dominici, Edoardo Alberto; Döring, Christian; Mueller, Joerg H.; Hladky, Jozef; Steinberger, Markus; Bermano, Amit H.; Kalogerakis, EvangelosSynthesising high-quality views of dynamic scenes via path tracing is prohibitively expensive. Although caching offline-quality global illumination in neural networks alleviates this issue, existing neural view synthesis methods are limited to mainly static scenes, have low inference performance or do not integrate well with existing rendering paradigms. We propose a novel neural method that is able to capture a dynamic light field, renders at real-time frame rates at 1920x1080 resolution and integrates seamlessly with Monte Carlo ray tracing frameworks. We demonstrate how a combination of spatial, temporal and a novel surface-space encoding are each effective at capturing different kinds of spatio-temporal signals. Together with a compact fully-fused neural network and architectural improvements, we achieve a twenty-fold increase in network inference speed compared to related methods at equal or better quality. Our approach is suitable for providing offline-quality real-time rendering in a variety of scenarios, such as free-viewpoint video, interactive multi-view rendering, or streaming rendering. Finally, our work can be integrated into other rendering paradigms, e.g., providing a dynamic background for interactive scenarios where the foreground is rendered with traditional methods.Item RTSDF: Generating Signed Distance Fields in Real Time for Soft Shadow Rendering(The Eurographics Association, 2020) Tan, Yu Wei; Chua, Nicholas; Koh, Clarence; Bhojan, Anand; Lee, Sung-hee and Zollmann, Stefanie and Okabe, Makoto and Wuensche, BurkhardSigned Distance Fields (SDFs) for surface representation are commonly generated offline and subsequently loaded into interactive applications like games. Since they are not updated every frame, they only provide a rigid surface representation. While there are methods to generate them quickly on GPU, the efficiency of these approaches is limited at high resolutions. This paper showcases a novel technique that combines jump flooding and ray tracing to generate approximate SDFs in real-time for soft shadow approximation, achieving prominent shadow penumbras while maintaining interactive frame rates.