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...

Next Event Estimation++: Visibility Mapping for Efficient Light Transport Simulation

Monte-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++):...

Ray Tracing for Real-time Games

This thesis describes efficient rendering algorithms based on ray tracing, and the application of these algorithms to real-time games. Compared to rasterizationbased approaches, rendering based on ray tracing allows elegant and correct simulation of important global effects, such as shadows, reflections and refractions. The price for these...

Unbiased physically based rendering on the GPU

Since the introduction of General-Purpose GPU computing, significant increase has been made in performance for regular path tracing. However, more advanced versions of path tracing such as BiDirectional Path Tracing (BDPT) and Energy Redistribution Path Tracing (ERPT) have not been implemented successfully so far due to their stochastic sampling...