Identifying and Visualizing Computational Hotspots in Path Tracing

Path tracing is a well-known light transport algorithm used to render photo-realistic images. However, it is an expensive algorithm with an active area of research for improving its efficiency. In our work, we present a method to measure and visualize the regions of high computational cost for unidirectional path tracers. We have defined metrics...

Efficient direct lighting calculations for area lights with light portals

Direct lighting calculation is an essential part of photorealistic rendering. Standard importance sampling techniques converge slowly in scenes where a light source is only visible through small openings as visibility is not considered. This problem is often addressed by manually placing light portals, marking the openings to the light. However,...

Efficient Emitter Sampling for Spectral Path Tracing

Spectral Monte-Carlo methods are powerful physically-based techniques for simulating wavelength-dependent phenomena such as dispersion. However, compared to tristimulus rendering, they involve sampling the spectral domain, which adds substantial overhead, requiring significantly more samples for noise-free, realistic-looking renders. Thereby, we...

Ambient Light Caching via Approximate Photon Mapping

Indirect illumination is an essential part of realistic computer-generated imagery. However, accurate calculation of indirect illumination comes at high compute costs. To this end, we replace lengthy indirect illumination paths by employing an ambient light cache based on photon mapping principles. By only performing cache queries after a...

Achieving Perceptually-Acceptable Early Renders in Spectral Progressive Rendering by Introducing Bias

Spectral Monte-Carlo rendering can simulate advanced light phenomena (e.g., dispersion, caustics, or iridescence), but require significantly more samples compared to trichromatic rendering to obtain noise-free images. Therefore, its progressive variant typically exhibits an extreme amount of chromatic noise in early renders. To that end, we...