Adaptive Matrix Completion for Fast Visibility Computations with Many Lights Rendering

Several fast global illumination algorithms rely on the Virtual Point Lights framework. This framework separates illumination into two steps: first, propagate radiance in the scene and store it in virtual lights, then gather illumination from these virtual lights. To accelerate the second step, virtual lights and receiving points are grouped hierarchically, for example using Multi-Dimensional Lightcuts. Computing visibility between clusters of virtual lights and receiving points is a bottleneck. Separately, matrix completion algorithms reconstruct completely a low-rank matrix from an incomplete set of sampled elements. In this paper, we use adaptive matrix completion to approximate visibility information after an initial clustering step. We reconstruct visibility information using as little as 10 % to 20 % samples for most scenes, and combine it with shading information computed separately, in parallel on the GPU. Overall, our method computes global illumination 3 or more times faster than previous state-of-the-art methods.     

A Scalable and Production Ready Sky and Atmosphere Rendering Technique

We present a physically based method to render the atmosphere of a planet from ground to space views. Our method is cheap to compute and, as compared to previous successful methods, does not require any high dimensional Lookup Tables (LUTs) and thus does not suffer from visual artifacts associated with them. We also propose a new approximation to evaluate light multiple scattering within the atmosphere in real time. We take a new look at what it means to render natural atmospheric effects, and propose a set of simple look up tables and parameterizations to render a sky and its aerial perspective. The atmosphere composition can change dynamically to match artistic visions and weather changes without requiring heavy LUT update. The complete technique can be used in real-time applications such as games, simulators or architecture pre-visualizations. The technique also scales from power-efficient mobile platforms up to PCs with high-end GPUs, and is also useful for accelerating path tracing.     

Photorealistic Material Editing Through Direct Image Manipulation

Creating photorealistic materials for light transport algorithms requires carefully fine-tuning a set of material properties to achieve a desired artistic effect. This is typically a lengthy process that involves a trained artist with specialized knowledge. In this work, we present a technique that aims to empower novice and intermediate-level users to synthesize high-quality photorealistic materials by only requiring basic image processing knowledge. In the proposed workflow, the user starts with an input image and applies a few intuitive transforms (e.g., colorization, image inpainting) within a 2D image editor of their choice, and in the next step, our technique produces a photorealistic result that approximates this target image. Our method combines the advantages of a neural network-augmented optimizer and an encoder neural network to produce high-quality output results within 30 seconds. We also demonstrate that it is resilient against poorly-edited target images and propose a simple extension to predict image sequences with a strict time budget of 1–2 seconds per image.     

Neural Denoising with Layer Embeddings

We propose a novel approach for denoising Monte Carlo path traced images, which uses data from individual samples rather than relying on pixel aggregates. Samples are partitioned into layers, which are filtered separately, giving the network more freedom to handle outliers and complex visibility. Finally the layers are composited front-to-back using alpha blending. The system is trained end-to-end, with learned layer partitioning, filter kernels, and compositing. We obtain similar image quality as recent state-of-the-art sample based denoisers at a fraction of the computational cost and memory requirements.     

Neural Temporal Adaptive Sampling and Denoising

Despite recent advances in Monte Carlo path tracing at interactive rates, denoised image sequences generated with few samples per-pixel often yield temporally unstable results and loss of high-frequency details. We present a novel adaptive rendering method that increases temporal stability and image fidelity of low sample count path tracing by distributing samples via spatio-temporal joint optimization of sampling and denoising. Adding temporal optimization to the sample predictor enables it to learn spatio-temporal sampling strategies such as placing more samples in disoccluded regions, tracking specular highlights, etc; adding temporal feedback to the denoiser boosts the effective input sample count and increases temporal stability. The temporal approach also allows us to remove the initial uniform sampling step typically present in adaptive sampling algorithms. The sample predictor and denoiser are deep neural networks that we co-train end-to-end over multiple consecutive frames. Our approach is scalable, allowing trade-off between quality and performance, and runs at near real-time rates while achieving significantly better image quality and temporal stability than previous methods.     

Spherical Gaussian Light-field Textures for Fast Precomputed Global Illumination

We describe a method to use Spherical Gaussians with free directions and arbitrary sharpness and amplitude to approximate the precomputed local light field for any point on a surface in a scene. This allows for a high-quality reconstruction of these light fields in a manner that can be used to render the surfaces with precomputed global illumination in real-time with very low cost both in memory and performance. We also extend this concept to represent the illumination-weighted environment visibility, allowing for high-quality reflections of the distant environment with both surface-material properties and visibility taken into account. We treat obtaining the Spherical Gaussians as an optimization problem for which we train a Convolutional Neural Network to produce appropriate values for each of the Spherical Gaussians' parameters. We define this CNN in such a way that the produced parameters can be interpolated between adjacent local light fields while keeping the illumination in the intermediate points coherent.     

Spectral Mollification for Bidirectional Fluorescence

Fluorescent materials can shift energy between wavelengths, thereby creating bright and saturated colors both in natural and artificial materials. However, rendering fluorescence for continuous wavelengths or combined with wavelength dependent path configurations so far has only been feasible using spectral unidirectional methods. We present a regularization-based approach for supporting fluorescence in a spectral bidirectional path tracer. Our algorithm samples camera and light sub-paths with independent wavelengths, and when connecting them mollifies the BSDF at one of the connecting vertices such that it reradiates light across multiple wavelengths. We discuss arising issues such as color bias in early iterations, consistency of the method and MIS weights in the presence of spectral mollification. We demonstrate our method in scenes combining fluorescence and transport phenomena that are difficult to render with unidirectional or spectrally discrete methods.     

Two-stage Resampling for Bidirectional Path Tracing with Multiple Light Sub-paths

Recent advances in bidirectional path tracing (BPT) reveal that the use of multiple light sub-paths and the resampling of a small number of these can improve the efficiency of BPT. By increasing the number of pre-sampled light sub-paths, the possibility of generating light paths that provide large contributions can be better explored and this can alleviate the correlation of light paths due to the reuse of pre-sampled light sub-paths by all eye sub-paths. The increased number of pre-sampled light subpaths, however, also incurs a high computational cost. In this paper, we propose a two-stage resampling method for BPT to efficiently handle a large number of pre-sampled light sub-paths. We also derive a weighting function that can treat the changes in path probability due to the two-stage resampling. Our method can handle a two orders of magnitude larger number of presampled light sub-paths than previous methods in equal-time rendering, resulting in stable and better noise reduction than state-of-the-art methods.     

Iridescent Water Droplets Beyond Mie Scattering

Looking at a cup of hot tea, an observer can see color patterns and granular textures both on the water surface and in the steam. Motivated by this example, we model the appearance of iridescent water droplets. Mie scattering describes the scattering of light waves by individual spherical particles and is the building block for both effects, but we show that other mechanisms must also be considered in order to faithfully reproduce the appearance. Iridescence on the water surface is caused by droplets levitating above the surface, and interference between light scattered by drops and reflected by the water surface, known as Quetelet scattering, is essential to producing the color. We propose a model, new to computer graphics, for rendering this phenomenon, which we validate against photographs. For iridescent steam, we show that variation in droplet size is essential to the characteristic color patterns. We build a droplet growth model and apply it as a post-processing step to an existing computer graphics fluid simulation to compute collections of particles for rendering. We significantly accelerate the rendering of sparse particles with motion blur by intersecting rays with particle trajectories, blending contributions along viewing rays. Our model reproduces the distinctive color patterns correlated with the steam flow. For both effects, we instantiate individual droplets and render them explicitly, since the granularity of droplets is readily observed in reality, and demonstrate that Mie scattering alone cannot reproduce the visual appearance.     

A Survey of Multifragment Rendering

In the past few years, advances in graphics hardware have fuelled an explosion of research and development in the field of interactive and real-time rendering in screen space. Following this trend, a rapidly increasing number of applications rely on multifragment rendering solutions to develop visually convincing graphics applications with dynamic content. The main advantage of these approaches is that they encompass additional rasterised geometry, by retaining more information from the fragment sampling domain, thus augmenting the visibility determination stage. With this survey, we provide an overview of and insight into the extensive, yet active research and respective literature on multifragment rendering. We formally present the multifragment rendering pipeline, clearly identifying the construction strategies, the core image operation categories and their mapping to the respective applications. We describe features and trade-offs for each class of techniques, pointing out GPU optimisations and limitations and provide practical recommendations for choosing an appropriate method for each application. Finally, we offer fruitful context for discussion by outlining some existing problems and challenges as well as by presenting opportunities for impactful future research directions.     

Accelerating Hair Rendering by Learning High-Order Scattered Radiance

Efficiently and accurately rendering hair accounting for multiple scattering is a challenging open problem. Path tracing in hair takes long to converge while other techniques are either too approximate while still being computationally expensive or make assumptions about the scene. We present a technique to infer the higher order scattering in hair in constant time within the path tracing framework, while achieving better computational efficiency. Our method makes no assumptions about the scene and provides control over the renderer's bias & speedup. We achieve this by training a small multilayer perceptron (MLP) to learn the higher-order radiance online, while rendering progresses. We describe how to robustly train this network and thoroughly analyze our resulting renderer's characteristics. We evaluate our method on various hairstyles and lighting conditions. We also compare our method against a recent learning based & a traditional real-time hair rendering method and demonstrate better quantitative & qualitative results. Our method achieves a significant improvement in speed with respect to path tracing, achieving a run-time reduction of 40%-70% while only introducing a small amount of bias.     

Real Time Multiscale Rendering of Dense Dynamic Stackings

Dense dynamic aggregates of similar elements are frequent in natural phenomena and challenging to render under full real time constraints. The optimal representation to render them changes drastically depending on the distance at which they are observed, ranging from sets of detailed textured meshes for near views to point clouds for distant ones. Our multiscale representation use impostors to achieve the mid-range transition from mesh-based to point-based scales. To ensure a visual continuum, the impostor model should match as closely as possible the mesh on one side, and reduce to a single pixel response that equals point rendering on the other. In this paper, we propose a model based on rich spherical impostors, able to combine precomputed as well as dynamic procedural data, and offering seamless transitions from close instanced meshes to distant points. Our approach is architectured around an on-the-fly discrimination mechanism and intensively exploits the rough spherical geometry of the impostor proxy. In particular, we propose a new sampling mechanism to reconstruct novel views from the precomputed ones, together with a new conservative occlusion culling method, coupled with a two-pass rendering pipeline leveraging early-Z rejection. As a result, our system scales well and is even able to render sand, while supporting completely dynamic stackings.     

Progressive Real-Time Rendering of One Billion Points Without Hierarchical Acceleration Structures

Research in rendering large point clouds traditionally focused on the generation and use of hierarchical acceleration structures that allow systems to load and render the smallest fraction of the data with the largest impact on the output. The generation of these structures is slow and time consuming, however, and therefore ill-suited for tasks such as quickly looking at scan data stored in widely used unstructured file formats, or to immediately display the results of point-cloud processing tasks. We propose a progressive method that is capable of rendering any point cloud that fits in GPU memory in real time, without the need to generate hierarchical acceleration structures in advance. Our method supports data sets with a large amount of attributes per point, achieves a load performance of up to 100 million points per second, displays already loaded data in real time while remaining data is still being loaded, and is capable of rendering up to one billion points using an on-the-fly generated shuffled vertex buffer as its data structure, instead of slow-to-generate hierarchical structures. Shuffling is done during loading in order to allow efficiently filling holes with random subsets, which leads to a higher quality convergence behavior.     

Markov Chain Mixture Models for Real-Time Direct Illumination

We present a novel technique to efficiently render complex direct illumination in real-time. It is based on a spatio-temporal randomized mixture model of von Mises-Fisher (vMF) distributions in screen space. For every pixel we determine the vMF distribution to sample from using a Markov chain process which is targeted to capture important features of the integrand. By this we avoid the storage overhead of finite-component deterministic mixture models, for which, in addition, determining the optimal component count is challenging. We use stochastic multiple importance sampling (SMIS) to be independent of the equilibrium distribution of our Markov chain process, since it cancels out in the estimator. Further, we use the same sample to advance the Markov chain and to construct the SMIS estimator and local Markov chain state permutations avoid the resulting bias due to dependent sampling. As a consequence we require one ray per sample and pixel only. We evaluate our technique using implementations in a research renderer as well as a classic game engine with highly dynamic content. Our results show that it is efficient and quickly readapts to dynamic conditions. We compare to spatio-temporal resampling (ReSTIR), which can suffer from correlation artifacts due to its non-adapting candidate distributions that can deviate strongly from the integrand. While we focus on direct illumination, our approach is more widely applicable and we exemplarily show the rendering of caustics.     

A Hyperspectral Space of Skin Tones for Inverse Rendering of Biophysical Skin Properties

We present a method for estimating the main properties of human skin, leveraging a hyperspectral dataset of skin tones synthetically generated through a biophysical layered skin model and Monte Carlo light transport simulations. Our approach learns the mapping between the skin parameters and diffuse skin reflectance in such space through an encoder-decoder network. We assess the performance of RGB and spectral reflectance up to 1 μm, allowing the model to retrieve visible and near-infrared. Instead of restricting the parameters to values in the ranges reported in medical literature, we allow the model to exceed such ranges to gain expressiveness to recover outliers like beard, eyebrows, rushes and other imperfections. The continuity of our albedo space allows to recover smooth textures of skin properties, enabling reflectance manipulations by meaningful edits of the skin properties. The space is robust under different illumination conditions, and presents high spectral similarity with the current largest datasets of spectral measurements of real human skin while expanding its gamut.     

Monocular Human Pose and Shape Reconstruction using Part Differentiable Rendering

Superior human pose and shape reconstruction from monocular images depends on removing the ambiguities caused by occlusions and shape variance. Recent works succeed in regression-based methods which estimate parametric models directly through a deep neural network supervised by 3D ground truth. However, 3D ground truth is neither in abundance nor can efficiently be obtained. In this paper, we introduce body part segmentation as critical supervision. Part segmentation not only indicates the shape of each body part but helps to infer the occlusions among parts as well. To improve the reconstruction with part segmentation, we propose a part-level differentiable renderer that enables part-based models to be supervised by part segmentation in neural networks or optimization loops. We also introduce a general parametric model engaged in the rendering pipeline as an intermediate representation between skeletons and detailed shapes, which consists of primitive geometries for better interpretability. The proposed approach combines parameter regression, body model optimization, and detailed model registration altogether. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves balanced evaluation on pose and shape, and outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches on Human3.6M, UP-3D and LSP datasets.     

Parallel Transformation of Bounding Volume Hierarchies into Oriented Bounding Box Trees

Oriented bounding box (OBB) hierarchies can be used instead of hierarchies based on axis-aligned bounding boxes (AABB), providing tighter fitting to the underlying geometric structures and resulting in improved interference tests, such as ray-geometry intersections. In this paper, we present a method for the fast, parallel transformation of an existing bounding volume hierarchy (BVH), based on AABBs, into a hierarchy based on oriented bounding boxes. To this end, we parallelise a high-quality OBB extraction algorithm from the literature to operate as a standalone OBB estimator and further extend it to efficiently build an OBB hierarchy in a bottom up manner. This agglomerative approach allows for fast parallel execution and the formation of arbitrary, high-quality OBBs in bounding volume hierarchies. The method is fully implemented on the GPU and extensively evaluated with ray intersections.     

Physics-Informed Neural Corrector for Deformation-based Fluid Control

Controlling fluid simulations is notoriously difficult due to its high computational cost and the fact that user control inputs can cause unphysical motion. We present an interactive method for deformation-based fluid control. Our method aims at balancing the direct deformations of fluid fields and the preservation of physical characteristics. We train convolutional neural networks with physics-inspired loss functions together with a differentiable fluid simulator, and provide an efficient workflow for flow manipulations at test time. We demonstrate diverse test cases to analyze our carefully designed objectives and show that they lead to physical and eventually visually appealing modifications on edited fluid data.     

DeepBRDF: A Deep Representation for Manipulating Measured BRDF

Effective compression of densely sampled BRDF measurements is critical for many graphical or vision applications. In this paper, we present DeepBRDF, a deep-learning-based representation that can significantly reduce the dimensionality of measured BRDFs while enjoying high quality of recovery. We consider each measured BRDF as a sequence of image slices and design a deep autoencoder with a masked L₂ loss to discover a nonlinear low-dimensional latent space of the high-dimensional input data. Thorough experiments verify that the proposed method clearly outperforms PCA-based strategies in BRDF data compression and is more robust. We demonstrate the effectiveness of DeepBRDF with two applications. For BRDF editing, we can easily create a new BRDF by navigating on the low-dimensional manifold of DeepBRDF, guaranteeing smooth transitions and high physical plausibility. For BRDF recovery, we design another deep neural network to automatically generate the full BRDF data from a single input image. Aided by our DeepBRDF learned from real-world materials, a wide range of reflectance behaviors can be recovered with high accuracy.     

CubeGAN: Omnidirectional Image Synthesis Using Generative Adversarial Networks

We propose a framework to create projectively-correct and seam-free cube-map images using generative adversarial learning. Deep generation of cube-maps that contain the correct projection of the environment onto its faces is not straightforward as has been recognized in prior work. Our approach extends an existing framework, StyleGAN3, to produce cube-maps instead of planar images. In addition to reshaping the output, we include a cube-specific volumetric initialization component, a projective resampling component, and a modification of augmentation operations to the spherical domain. Our results demonstrate the network's generation capabilities trained on imagery from various 3D environments. Additionally, we show the power and quality of our GAN design in an inversion task, combined with navigation capabilities, to perform novel view synthesis.