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...

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++):...

Pre-Estimated Spectral Rendering

Spectral Monte Carlo renderers are capable of reproducing several advanced phenomena of light, such as chromatic dispersion and fluorescence. As spectral renderers must sample the spectral domain, they are typically hampered by a multitude of sampling issues leading to notably poor convergence rates, which are reinforced when realistic emission...

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...