Alternative Representations and Techniques for Accelerated Realistic Image Synthesis: Improved Sampling, Reconstruction and Modelling Methods

Realism has always been a major goal in visual content creation - from oil painting to motion pictures, from graphic arts to scientific data visualization. Computer graphics creates a virtual reality with digital representations. Trading between accuracy and speed, realistic rendering either creates photorealistic renders that follow strict...

Stochastic Light Cut Exploration: for Real-Time Global Illumination

Global Illumination provides natural and more realistic illumination of a scene by simulating the bouncing of light between surfaces. Due to its complex nature, it still remains a challenge to simulate this effect with real-time frame rates even on modern-day hardware. Existing methods are noisy and either require extensive filtering or long...

LightGuider: Guiding interactive lighting design using suggestions, provenance, and quality visualization

LightGuider is a novel guidance-based approach to interactive lighting design, which typically consists of interleaved 3D modeling operations and light transport simulations. Rather than having designers use a trial-And-error approach to match their illumination constraints and aesthetic goals, LightGuider supports the process by simulating...

Hash-based hierarchical caching and layered filtering for interactive previews in global illumination rendering

Modern Monte-Carlo-based rendering systems still suffer from the computational complexity involved in the generation of noise-free images, making it challenging to synthesize interactive previews. We present a framework suited for rendering such previews of static scenes using a caching technique that builds upon a linkless octree. Our...

Adaptive Multi-view Screen-space Ambient Obscurance

Screen-space ambient obscurance techniques provide a cheap, yet visually pleasing approximation to the expensive global illumination effect. However, view-dependent artifacts frequently occur due to the limited scene information available in a single view, which forms the basis of these solutions. Recent work aims at suppressing artifacts with...

Incrementally baked global illumination

Global Illumination is affected by the slightest change in a 3D scene, requiring a complete reevaluation of the distributed light. In cases where real-time algorithms are not applicable due to high demands on the achievable accuracy, this recomputation from scratch results in artifacts like flickering or noise, disturbing the visual...

DaisyRiot: Building a global illumination renderer based on radiosity

This report documents the DaisyRiot global illumination renderer. The renderer applies the radiosity method and uses spectral rendering in order to simulate fluorescent materials: materials can reflect energy of a given frequency at another frequency. Rendering is accelerated by NVIDIA OptiX and CUDA parallelization. In this document you will...

Representing Large Virtual Worlds

The ubiquity of large virtual worlds and their growing complexity in computer graphics require efficient representations. This means that we need smart solutions for the underlying storage of these complex environments, but also for their visualization. How the virtual world is best stored and how it is subsequently shown to the user in an...

MegaViews: Scalable Many-View Rendering With Concurrent Scene-View Hierarchy Traversal

We present a scalable solution to render complex scenes from a large amount of viewpoints. While previous approaches rely either on a scene or a view hierarchy to process multiple elements together, we make full use of both, enabling sublinear performance in terms of views and scene complexity. By concurrently traversing the hierarchies, we...

Applying Visual Analytics to Physically Based Rendering

Physically based rendering is a well-understood technique to produce realistic-looking images. However, different algorithms exist for efficiency reasons, which work well in certain cases but fail or produce rendering artefacts in others. Few tools allow a user to gain insight into the algorithmic processes. In this work, we present such a tool,...