Adaptive Records for Irradiance Caching

Irradiance Caching is one of the most widely used algorithms to speed up global illumination. In this paper, we propose an algorithm based on the Irradiance Caching scheme that allows us (1) to adjust the density of cached records according to illumination changes and (2) to efficiently render the high‐frequency illumination changes. To achieve this, a new record footprint is presented. Although the original method uses records having circular footprints depending only on geometrical features, our record footprints have a more complex shape which accounts for both geometry and irradiance variations. Irradiance values are computed using a classical Monte Carlo ray tracing method that simplifies the determination of nearby objects and the pre‐computation of the shape of the influence zone of the current record. By gathering irradiance due to all the incident rays, illumination changes are evaluated to adjust the footprint’s records. As a consequence, the record footprints are smaller where illumination gradients are high. With this technique, the record density depends on the irradiance variations. Strong variations of irradiance (due to direct contributions for example) can be handled and evaluated accurately. Caching direct illumination is of high importance, especially in the case of scenes having many light sources with complex geometry as well as surfaces exposed to daylight. Recomputing direct illumination for the whole image can be very time‐consuming, especially for walkthrough animation rendering or for high‐resolution pictures. Storing such contributions in the irradiance cache seems to be an appropriate solution to accelerate the final rendering pass.     

Photon‐driven Irradiance Cache

We describe a global illumination method combining two well known techniques: photon mapping and irradiance caching. The photon mapping method has the advantage of being view independent but requires a costly additional rendering pass, called final gathering. As for irradiance caching, it is view‐dependent, irradiance is only computed and cached on surfaces of the scene as viewed by a single camera. To compute records covering the entire scene, the irradiance caching method has to be run for many cameras, which takes a long time and is a tedious task since the user has to place the needed cameras manually. Our method exploits the advantages of these two methods and avoids any intervention of the user. It computes a refined, view‐independent irradiance cache from a photon map. The global illumination solution is then rendered interactively using radiance cache splatting.     

Higher Order Ray Marching

Rendering participating media is still a challenging and time consuming task. In such media light interacts at every differential point of its path. Several rendering algorithms are based on ray marching: dividing the path of light into segments and calculating interactions at each of them. In this work, we revisit and analyze ray marching both as a quadrature integrator and as an initial value problem solver, and apply higher order adaptive solvers that ensure several interesting properties, such as faster convergence, adaptiveness to the mathematical definition of light transport and robustness to singularities. We compare several numerical methods, including standard ray marching and Monte Carlo integration, and illustrate the benefits of different solvers for a variety of scenes. Any participating media rendering algorithm that is based on ray marching may benefit from the application of our approach by reducing the number of needed samples (and therefore, rendering time) and increasing accuracy.     

Parallel Irradiance Caching for Interactive Monte‐Carlo Direct Volume Rendering

We propose a technique to build the irradiance cache for isotropic scattering simultaneously with Monte Carlo progressive direct volume rendering on a single GPU, which allows us to achieve up to four times increased convergence rate for complex scenes with arbitrary sources of light. We use three procedures that run concurrently on a single GPU. The first is the main rendering procedure. The second procedure computes new cache entries, and the third one corrects the errors that may arise after creation of new cache entries. We propose two distinct approaches to allow massive parallelism of cache entry creation. In addition, we show a novel extrapolation approach which outputs high quality irradiance approximations and a suitable prioritization scheme to increase the convergence rate by dedicating more computational power to more complex rendering areas.     

使用光子映射渲染参与介质

光子映射是近年发展起来的一种新的全局光照算法。本文依据光子映射对实体物体的渲染,将其扩展到对包含参与介质的场景的渲染,为此提出了一个两路的渲染算法。在第一路中,光子从光源发射,并使用光子追踪来构造体光子图;第二路从视点出发向场景中发射光线,使用光线追踪来进行渲染,其中,根据构造好的光子图,用光线步进进行
行递归的辐射估计,得出最终光强。     

均匀参与介质的渲染方法研究

参与介质在现实世界中广泛存在,光线在参与介质中的传播过程比在表面上的传播过程更加复杂,比如在高度散射参与介质中会发生成千上万次反射、在低散射参与介质中由于表面聚集出现体焦散效果,从而使得光线的模拟过程非常耗时。目前常用的方法包括点、光束和路径统一模型法（unifying points,beams and paths,UPBP）以及流型探索梅特罗波利斯光线传递方法（manifold exploration Metropolis light transport,MEMLT）等,这些方法在一定程度上改进了原有方法,但是在一些特殊情况下仍然需要很长时间才能收敛。本文介绍几种针对均匀参与介质的高效渲染方法。1）基于点的参与介质渲染方法,主要通过在参与介质内分布一些点来分别加速单次、二次和多次散射的计算,在GPU （graphics processing unit）实现的基础上,最终达到可交互的效率,并且支持对任意的均匀参与介质的编辑。2）基于多次反射的预计算模型,预计算出无限参与介质中的多次散射分布,通过分析光照分布的对称性,将该分布的维度从4维减低为3维,并且将该分布应用到多种蒙特卡洛渲染方法中,比如MEMLT、UPBP等,从而提高效率。3）参与介质中的路径指导方法,通过学习光线在参与介质中的分布,该分布用SD-tree （spatial-directional tree）来表示,与相位函数进行重采样来产生出射方向。以上3种方法分别从不同角度加快了参与介质的渲染效率。     

Interactive rendering of globally illuminated scenes including anisotropic and inhomogeneous participating media

Although new graphics hardware has accelerated the rendering process, the realistic simulation of scenes including participating media remains a difficult problem. Interactive results have been achieved for isotropic media as well as for single scattering. In this paper, we present an interactive global illumination algorithm for the simulation of scenes that include participating media, even anisotropic and/or inhomogeneous media. The position of the observer is important in order to render inhomogeneous media according to the transport equation. Previous work normally needed to be ray-based in order to compute this equation properly. Our approach is capable of achieving real time using two 3D textures on a simple desktop PC. For anisotropic participating media we combine density estimation techniques and graphics hardware capabilities.     

Perceptually Guided Corrective Splatting

One of the basic difficulties with interactive walkthroughs is the high quality rendering of object surfaces with non-diffuse light scattering characteristics. Since full ray tracing at interactive rates is usually impossible, we render a precomputed global illumination solution using graphics hardware and use remaining computational power to correct the appearance of non-diffuse objects on-the-fly. The question arises, how to obtain the best image quality as perceived by a human observer within a limited amount of time for each frame. We address this problem by enforcing corrective computation for those non-diffuse objects that are selected using a computational model of visual attention. We consider both the saliency- and task-driven selection of those objects and benefit from the fact that shading artifacts of "unattended" objects are likely to remain unnoticed. We use a hierarchical image-space sampling scheme to control ray tracing and splat the generated point samples. The resulting image converges progressively to a ray traced solution if the viewing parameters remain unchanged. Moreover, we use a sample cache to enhance visual appearance if the time budget for correction has been too low for some frame. We check the validity of the cached samples using a novel criterion suited for non-diffuse surfaces and reproject valid samples into the current view.     

Realistic real-time rendering of light shafts using blur filter: considering the effect of shadow maps

The ray marching method has become the most attractive method to provide realism in rendering the effects of light scattering in the participating media of numerous applications. This has attracted significant attention from scientific community. Up-sampling of ray marching method is suitable for rendering light shafts of realistic scenes, but suffers of consume a lot of time for rendering. Therefore, some encouraging outcomes have been achieved by using down-sampling of ray marching approach to accelerate rendered scenes. However, these methods are inherently prone to artifacts, aliasing and incorrect boundaries due to the reduced number of sample points along view rays. This research proposes a realistic real-time technique to generate soft light shafts by making use downsampling of ray marching in generating light shafts. The bilateral filtering is then applied to overcome all defects that caused by downsampling process to make a scene with smoothing transition while preserving on the edges. The contribution of this technique is to improve the boundaries of light shafts taking into account the effect of shadows. This technique allows obtaining soft marvelous light shafts, having a good performance and high quality. Thus, it is suitable for interactive applications.

     

A radiance cache method for highly glossy surfaces

Radiance caching methods have proven to be efficient for global illumination. Their goal is to compute precisely illumination values (incident radiance or irradiance) at a reasonable number of points lying on the scene surfaces. These points, called records, are stored in a cache used for estimating illumination at other points in the scene. Unfortunately, with records lying on glossy surfaces, the irradiance value alone is not sufficient to evaluate the reflected radiance; each record should also store the incident radiance for all incident directions. Memory storage can be reduced with projection techniques using spherical harmonics or other basis functions. These techniques provide good results for low shininess BRDFs. However, they get impractical for shininess of even moderate value, since the number of projection coefficients increases drastically. In this paper, we propose a new radiance caching method that handles highly glossy surfaces while requiring a low memory storage. Each cache record stores a coarse representation of the incident illumination thanks to a new data structure, called Equivalent Area light Sources, capable of handling fuzzy mirror surfaces. In addition, our method proposes a new simplification of the interpolation process, since it avoids the need for expressing and evaluating complex gradients.     

Interactive high-resolution isosurface ray casting on multicore processors

We present a new method for the interactive rendering of isosurfaces using ray casting on multi-core processors. This method consists of a combination of an object-order traversal that coarsely identifies possible candidate 3D data blocks for each small set of contiguous pixels, and an isosurface ray casting strategy tailored for the resulting limited-size lists of candidate 3D data blocks. While static screen partitioning is widely used in the literature, our scheme performs dynamic allocation of groups of ray casting tasks to ensure almost equal loads among the different threads running on multi-cores while maintaining spatial locality. We also make careful use of memory management environment commonly present in multi-core processors. We test our system on a two-processor Clovertown platform, each consisting of a Quad-Core 1.86-GHz Intel Xeon Processor, for a number of widely different benchmarks. The detailed experimental results show that our system is efficient and scalable, and achieves high cache performance and excellent load balancing, resulting in an overall performance that is superior to any of the previous algorithms. In fact, we achieve an interactive isosurface rendering on a 1024(2) screen for all the datasets tested up to the maximum size of the main memory of our platform.     

Progressive Expectation‐Maximization for Hierarchical Volumetric Photon Mapping

State‐of‐the‐art density estimation methods for rendering participating media rely on a dense photon representation of the radiance distribution within a scene. A critical bottleneck of such kernel‐based approaches is the excessive number of photons that are required in practice to resolve fine illumination details, while controlling the amount of noise. In this paper, we propose a parametric density estimation technique that represents radiance using a hierarchical Gaussian mixture. We efficiently obtain the coefficients of this mixture using a progressive and accelerated form of the Expectation‐Maximization algorithm. After this step, we are able to create noise‐free renderings of high‐frequency illumination using only a few thousand Gaussian terms, where millions of photons are traditionally required. Temporal coherence is trivially supported within this framework, and the compact footprint is also useful in the context of real‐time visualization. We demonstrate a hierarchical ray tracing‐based implementation, as well as a fast splatting approach that can interactively render animated volume caustics.     

Proactive caching of DNS records: addressing a performance bottleneck

The resolution of a host name to an IP-address is a necessary predecessor to connection establishment and HTTP exchanges. Nonetheless, domain name system (DNS) resolutions often involve multiple remote name-servers and prolong Web response times. To alleviate this problem name-servers and Web browsers cache query results. Name-servers currently incorporate passive cache management where records are brought into the cache only as a result of clients’ requests and are used for the time to live (TTL) duration (a TTL value is provided with each record). We propose and evaluate different enhancements to passive caching that reduce the fraction of HTTP connection establishments that are delayed by slow DNS resolutions: (A) Renewal policies refresh selected expired cached entries by issuing unsolicited queries. Trace-based simulations using Web proxy logs demonstrated that a significant fraction of cache misses can be eliminated with a moderate increase in the number of DNS queries. (B) Simultaneous-validation transparently uses expired records. A DNS query is issued if the respective cached entry is no longer fresh, but concurrently, the expired entry is used to connect to the Web server and fetch the requested content. The content is served only if the expired records used turn out to be in agreement with the query response.     

Parallel Multiple‐Bounce Irradiance Caching

Building designers rely on predictive rendering techniques to design naturally and artificially lit environments. However, despite decades of work on the correctness of global illumination rendering techniques, our ability to accurately predict light levels in buildings—and to do so in a short time frame as part of an iterative design process—remains limited. In this paper, we present a novel approach to parallelizing construction of an irradiance cache over multiple‐bounce paths. Relevant points for irradiance calculation based on one or multiple cameras are located by tracing rays through multiple‐bounce paths. Irradiance values are then saved to a cache in reverse bounce order so that the irradiance calculation at each bounce samples from previously calculated values. We show by comparison to high‐dynamic range photography of a moderately complex space that our method can predict luminance distribution as accurately as Radiance , the most widely validated tool used today for architectural predictive rendering of daylit spaces, and that it is faster by an order of magnitude.     

GPU-Assisted High Quality Particle Rendering

Visualizing dynamic participating media in particle form by fully solving equations from the light transport theory is a computationally very expensive process. In this paper, we present a computational pipeline for particle volume rendering that is easily accelerated by the current GPU. To fully harness its massively parallel computing power, we transform input particles into a volumetric density field using a GPU-assisted, adaptive density estimation technique that iteratively adapts the smoothing length for local grid cells. Then, the volume data is visualized efficiently based on the volume photon mapping method where our GPU techniques further improve the rendering quality offered by previous implementations while performing rendering computation in acceptable time. It is demonstrated that high quality volume renderings can be easily produced from large particle datasets in time frames of a few seconds to less than a minute.     

Scalable Virtual Ray Lights Rendering for Participating Media

Virtual ray lights (VRL) are a powerful representation for multiple‐scattered light transport in volumetric participating media. While efficient Monte Carlo estimators can importance sample the contribution of a VRL along an entire sensor subpath, render time still scales linearly in the number of VRLs. We present a new scalable hierarchial VRL method that preferentially samples VRLs according to their image contribution. Similar to Lightcuts‐based approaches, we derive a tight upper bound on the potential contribution of a VRL that is efficient to compute. Our bound takes into account the sampling probability densities used when estimating VRL contribution. Ours is the first such upper bound formulation, leading to an efficient and scalable rendering technique with only a few intuitive user parameters. We benchmark our approach in scenes with many VRLs, demonstrating improved scalability compared to existing state‐of‐the‐art techniques.     

基于纹理数组的大规模地形绘制算法

将Shader Model 4.0引入的纹理数组技术同顶点纹理拾取技术、瓦片块四叉树算法和地形分块技术等相结合,提出了一种基于GPU的大规模地形绘制方法。将整个大规模地形数据分割成地形块,按照金字塔模型保存在CPU内存里,将地形中潜在的可见部分以纹理数组形式驻留在GPU Cache里;在CPU上发送瓦片块四叉树平面网格,利用存储在GPU Cache里的高程值生成相应的地形;GPU Cache随着视点运动而连续更新。实验证明该方法充分利用了现代GPU的特性,适合于大规模地形的漫游。     

Ray Classification for Accelerated BVH Traversal

For ray tracing based methods, traversing a hierarchical acceleration data structure takes up a substantial portion of the total rendering time. We propose an additional data structure which cuts off large parts of the hierarchical traversal. We use the idea of ray classification combined with the hierarchical scene representation provided by a bounding volume hierarchy. We precompute short arrays of indices to subtrees inside the hierarchy and use them to initiate the traversal for a given ray class. This arrangement is compact enough to be cache‐friendly, preventing the method from negating its traversal gains by excessive memory traffic. The method is easy to use with existing renderers which we demonstrate by integrating it to the PBRT renderer. The proposed technique reduces the number of traversal steps by 42% on average, saving around 15% of time of finding ray‐scene intersection on average.     

非经典参与介质的渲染方法研究综述

参与介质在自然界中广泛存在,也是包括影视特效、电子游戏、仿真系统等大多数图形应用中的主要场景元素之一,对其外观的模拟和再现,可以极大地提升场景的真实感和沉浸感.但是由于参与介质本身结构以及光线在参与介质中的传播过程都非常复杂,所以迄今为止,对参与介质渲染的研究都一直是图形领域的热点和难点.为了处理的方便和计算的高效,传统的参与介质渲染方法都基于两点假设:独立散射假设和局部连续假设.这两点假设也是经典的辐射传输方程成立的关键.但实际上,自然界中的很多参与介质都不满足这两点假设,因此导致现有的参与介质渲染方法生成的图片效果和真实世界的效果存在一定的差异.近年来,研究者们提出了各种非经典参与介质渲染方法,试图打破上述的两点假设,用更符合物理客观规律的方式来处理参与介质,从而进一步提升参与介质渲染的物理真实感.从相干介质渲染技术和离散介质渲染技术两方面展开对现有的面向非经典参与介质的渲染方法进行分析和讨论,重点阐述经典和非经典参与介质渲染方法的区别,以及现有非经典参与介质渲染方法的原理、优势和不足.最后,展望一些开放性问题并进行总结.本综述希望能启发相关领域的研究人员进一步攻克非经典参与介质渲...     

Radiance caching for efficient global illumination computation

In this paper, we present a ray tracing-based method for accelerated global illumination computation in scenes with low-frequency glossy BRDFs. The method is based on sparse sampling, caching, and interpolating radiance on glossy surfaces. In particular, we extend the irradiance caching scheme proposed by Ward et al. (1988) to cache and interpolate directional incoming radiance instead of irradiance. The incoming radiance at a point is represented by a vector of coefficients with respect to a hemispherical or spherical basis. The surfaces suitable for interpolation are selected automatically according to the roughness of their BRDF. We also propose a novel method for computing translational radiance gradient at a point.