均匀参与介质的渲染方法研究

参与介质在现实世界中广泛存在,光线在参与介质中的传播过程比在表面上的传播过程更加复杂,比如在高度散射参与介质中会发生成千上万次反射、在低散射参与介质中由于表面聚集出现体焦散效果,从而使得光线的模拟过程非常耗时。目前常用的方法包括点、光束和路径统一模型法（unifying points,beams and paths,UPBP）以及流型探索梅特罗波利斯光线传递方法（manifold exploration Metropolis light transport,MEMLT）等,这些方法在一定程度上改进了原有方法,但是在一些特殊情况下仍然需要很长时间才能收敛。本文介绍几种针对均匀参与介质的高效渲染方法。1）基于点的参与介质渲染方法,主要通过在参与介质内分布一些点来分别加速单次、二次和多次散射的计算,在GPU （graphics processing unit）实现的基础上,最终达到可交互的效率,并且支持对任意的均匀参与介质的编辑。2）基于多次反射的预计算模型,预计算出无限参与介质中的多次散射分布,通过分析光照分布的对称性,将该分布的维度从4维减低为3维,并且将该分布应用到多种蒙特卡洛渲染方法中,比如MEMLT、UPBP等,从而提高效率。3）参与介质中的路径指导方法,通过学习光线在参与介质中的分布,该分布用SD-tree （spatial-directional tree）来表示,与相位函数进行重采样来产生出射方向。以上3种方法分别从不同角度加快了参与介质的渲染效率。     

Analytic Spectral Integration of Birefringence‐Induced Iridescence

Optical phenomena that are only observable in optically anisotropic materials are generally ignored in the computer graphics. However, such optical effects are not restricted to exotic materials and can also be observed with common translucent objects when optical anisotropy is induced, e.g. via mechanical stress. Furthermore accurate prediction and reproduction of those optical effects has important practical applications. We provide a short but complete analysis of the relevant electromagnetic theory of light propagation in optically anisotropic media and derive the full set of formulations required to render birefringent materials. We then present a novel method for spectral integration of refraction and reflection in an anisotropic slab. Our approach allows fast and robust rendering of birefringence‐induced iridescence in a physically faithful manner and is applicable to both real‐time and offline rendering.     

The Beam Radiance Estimate for Volumetric Photon Mapping

We present a new method for efficiently simulating the scattering of light within participating media. Using a theoretical reformulation of volumetric photon mapping, we develop a novel photon gathering technique for participating media. Traditional volumetric photon mapping samples the in‐scattered radiance at numerous points along the length of a single ray by performing costly range queries within the photon map. Our technique replaces these multiple point‐queries with a single beam‐query, which explicitly gathers all photons along the length of an entire ray. These photons are used to estimate the accumulated in‐scattered radiance arriving from a particular direction and need to be gathered only once per ray. Our method handles both fixed and adaptive kernels, is faster than regular volumetric photon mapping, and produces images with less noise.     

动态非均质半透明物体的实时绘制算法

现有的对半透明物体的绘制算法中大部分都是为均质材质设计的,虽然有少数算法可以绘制非均质材质,但效率不高,为此提出一种图形硬件加速的动态非均质半透明物体的实时绘制算法.首先将模型的采样点组织成八叉树的形式,将双向次表面散射反射函数(BSSRDF)表达绑定为顶点属性,同时充分利用图形硬件的并行性来实现八叉树的快速建立和遍历;然后以树的结点之间的空间距离和材质的相似度为准则提出一种新的采样方法来提高表面积分的效率.由于整个过程不需要任何预计算,因此该算法可以很容易地扩展到动画场景或者变化的材质,并且还可以灵活地选择BSSRDF的表达方式.实验结果表明,文中算法可以达到实时的绘制帧率和良好的视觉效果.     

Progressive Expectation‐Maximization for Hierarchical Volumetric Photon Mapping

State‐of‐the‐art density estimation methods for rendering participating media rely on a dense photon representation of the radiance distribution within a scene. A critical bottleneck of such kernel‐based approaches is the excessive number of photons that are required in practice to resolve fine illumination details, while controlling the amount of noise. In this paper, we propose a parametric density estimation technique that represents radiance using a hierarchical Gaussian mixture. We efficiently obtain the coefficients of this mixture using a progressive and accelerated form of the Expectation‐Maximization algorithm. After this step, we are able to create noise‐free renderings of high‐frequency illumination using only a few thousand Gaussian terms, where millions of photons are traditionally required. Temporal coherence is trivially supported within this framework, and the compact footprint is also useful in the context of real‐time visualization. We demonstrate a hierarchical ray tracing‐based implementation, as well as a fast splatting approach that can interactively render animated volume caustics.     

Adaptive Caustic Maps Using Deferred Shading

Caustic maps provide an interactive image-space method to render caustics, the focusing of light via reflection and refraction. Unfortunately, caustic mapping suffers problems similar to shadow mapping: aliasing from poor sampling and map projection as well as temporal incoherency from frame-to-frame sampling variations. To reduce these problems, researchers have suggested methods ranging from caustic blurring to building a multiresolution caustic map. Yet these all require a fixed photon sampling, precluding the use of importance-based photon densities. This paper introduces adaptive caustic maps. Instead of densely sampling photons via a rasterization pass, we adaptively emit photons using a deferred shading pass. We describe deferred rendering for refractive surfaces, which speeds rendering of refractive geometry up to 25% and with adaptive sampling speeds caustic rendering up to 200%. These benefits are particularly noticable for complex geometry or using millions of photons. While developed for a GPU rasterizer, adaptive caustic map creation can be performed by any renderer that individually traces photons, e.g., a GPU ray tracer.     

Higher Order Ray Marching

Rendering participating media is still a challenging and time consuming task. In such media light interacts at every differential point of its path. Several rendering algorithms are based on ray marching: dividing the path of light into segments and calculating interactions at each of them. In this work, we revisit and analyze ray marching both as a quadrature integrator and as an initial value problem solver, and apply higher order adaptive solvers that ensure several interesting properties, such as faster convergence, adaptiveness to the mathematical definition of light transport and robustness to singularities. We compare several numerical methods, including standard ray marching and Monte Carlo integration, and illustrate the benefits of different solvers for a variety of scenes. Any participating media rendering algorithm that is based on ray marching may benefit from the application of our approach by reducing the number of needed samples (and therefore, rendering time) and increasing accuracy.     

Adaptive Ray‐bundle Tracing with Memory Usage Prediction: Efficient Global Illumination in Large Scenes

This paper proposes an adaptive rendering technique for ray‐bundle tracing. Ray‐bundle tracing can be done by per‐pixel linked‐list construction on a GPU rasterization pipeline. This rasterization based approach offers significant benefits for the efficient generation of light maps (e.g., hardware acceleration, tessellation, and recycling of shaders used in real‐time graphics). However, it is inapplicable to large and complex scenes due to the limited capacity of the GPU memory because it requires a high‐resolution frame buffer and high‐capacity node buffer for the linked‐lists. In addition, memory overflow can potentially occur on the per‐pixel linked‐list since the memory usage of the lists is usually unknown before the rendering process. We introduce an adaptive tiling technique with memory usage prediction. Our method uses an appropriately tiled frame buffer, thus eliminating almost all of the overflow risks thanks to our adaptive tile subdivision scheme. Using this technique, we are able to render high‐quality light maps of large and complex scenes which cannot be computed using previous ray‐bundle based methods.     

Photon Beam Diffusion: A Hybrid Monte Carlo Method for Subsurface Scattering

We present photon beam diffusion, an efficient numerical method for accurately rendering translucent materials. Our approach interprets incident light as a continuous beam of photons inside the material. Numerically integrating diffusion from such extended sources has long been assumed computationally prohibitive, leading to the ubiquitous single‐depth dipole approximation and the recent analytic sum‐of‐Gaussians approach employed by Quantized Diffusion. In this paper, we show that numerical integration of the extended beam is not only feasible, but provides increased speed, flexibility, numerical stability, and ease of implementation, while retaining the benefits of previous approaches. We leverage the improved diffusion model, but propose an efficient and numerically stable Monte Carlo integration scheme that gives equivalent results using only 3–5 samples instead of 20–60 Gaussians as in previous work. Our method can account for finite and multi‐layer materials, and additionally supports directional incident effects at surfaces. We also propose a novel diffuse exact single‐scattering term which can be integrated in tandem with the multi‐scattering approximation. Our numerical approach furthermore allows us to easily correct inaccuracies of the diffusion model and even combine it with more general Monte Carlo rendering algorithms. We provide practical details necessary for efficient implementation, and demonstrate the versatility of our technique by incorporating it on top of several rendering algorithms in both research and production rendering systems.     

Approximate Bias Compensation for Rendering Scenes with Heterogeneous Participating Media

In this paper we present a novel method for high‐quality rendering of scenes with participating media. Our technique is based on instant radiosity, which is used to approximate indirect illumination between surfaces by gathering light from a set of virtual point lights (VPLs). It has been shown that this principle can be applied to participating media as well, so that the combined single scattering contribution of VPLs within the medium yields full multiple scattering. As in the surface case, VPL methods for participating media are prone to singularities, which appear as bright “splotches” in the image. These artifacts are usually countered by clamping the VPLs' contribution, but this leads to energy loss within the short‐distance light transport. Bias compensation recovers the missing energy, but previous approaches are prohibitively costly. We investigate VPL‐based methods for rendering scenes with participating media, and propose a novel and efficient approximate bias compensation technique. We evaluate our technique using various test scenes, showing it to be visually indistinguishable from ground truth.     

使用光子映射渲染参与介质

光子映射是近年发展起来的一种新的全局光照算法。本文依据光子映射对实体物体的渲染,将其扩展到对包含参与介质的场景的渲染,为此提出了一个两路的渲染算法。在第一路中,光子从光源发射,并使用光子追踪来构造体光子图;第二路从视点出发向场景中发射光线,使用光线追踪来进行渲染,其中,根据构造好的光子图,用光线步进进行
行递归的辐射估计,得出最终光强。     

Efficient Caustic Rendering with Lightweight Photon Mapping

Robust and efficient rendering of complex lighting effects, such as caustics, remains a challenging task. While algorithms like vertex connection and merging can render such effects robustly, their significant overhead over a simple path tracer is not always justified and – as we show in this paper ‐ also not necessary. In current rendering solutions, caustics often require the user to enable a specialized algorithm, usually a photon mapper, and hand‐tune its parameters. But even with carefully chosen parameters, photon mapping may still trace many photons that the path tracer could sample well enough, or, even worse, that are not visible at all. Our goal is robust, yet lightweight, caustics rendering. To that end, we propose a technique to identify and focus computation on the photon paths that offer significant variance reduction over samples from a path tracer. We apply this technique in a rendering solution combining path tracing and photon mapping. The photon emission is automatically guided towards regions where the photons are useful, i.e., provide substantial variance reduction for the currently rendered image. Our method achieves better photon densities with fewer light paths (and thus photons) than emission guiding approaches based on visual importance. In addition, we automatically determine an appropriate number of photons for a given scene, and the algorithm gracefully degenerates to pure path tracing for scenes that do not benefit from photon mapping.     

非经典参与介质的渲染方法研究综述

参与介质在自然界中广泛存在,也是包括影视特效、电子游戏、仿真系统等大多数图形应用中的主要场景元素之一,对其外观的模拟和再现,可以极大地提升场景的真实感和沉浸感.但是由于参与介质本身结构以及光线在参与介质中的传播过程都非常复杂,所以迄今为止,对参与介质渲染的研究都一直是图形领域的热点和难点.为了处理的方便和计算的高效,传统的参与介质渲染方法都基于两点假设:独立散射假设和局部连续假设.这两点假设也是经典的辐射传输方程成立的关键.但实际上,自然界中的很多参与介质都不满足这两点假设,因此导致现有的参与介质渲染方法生成的图片效果和真实世界的效果存在一定的差异.近年来,研究者们提出了各种非经典参与介质渲染方法,试图打破上述的两点假设,用更符合物理客观规律的方式来处理参与介质,从而进一步提升参与介质渲染的物理真实感.从相干介质渲染技术和离散介质渲染技术两方面展开对现有的面向非经典参与介质的渲染方法进行分析和讨论,重点阐述经典和非经典参与介质渲染方法的区别,以及现有非经典参与介质渲染方法的原理、优势和不足.最后,展望一些开放性问题并进行总结.本综述希望能启发相关领域的研究人员进一步攻克非经典参与介质渲...     

Accurate Translucent Material Rendering under Spherical Gaussian Lights

In this paper we present a new algorithm for accurate rendering of translucent materials under Spherical Gaussian (SG) lights. Our algorithm builds upon the quantized‐diffusion BSSRDF model recently introduced in [ [dI11] ]. Our main contribution is an efficient algorithm for computing the integral of the BSSRDF with an SG light. We incorporate both single and multiple scattering components. Our model improves upon previous work by accounting for the incident angle of each individual SG light. This leads to more accurate rendering results, notably elliptical profiles from oblique illumination. In contrast, most existing models only consider the total irradiance received from all lights, hence can only generate circular profiles. Experimental results show that our method is suitable for rendering of translucent materials under finite‐area lights or environment lights that can be approximated by a small number of SGs.     

Scalable Virtual Ray Lights Rendering for Participating Media

Virtual ray lights (VRL) are a powerful representation for multiple‐scattered light transport in volumetric participating media. While efficient Monte Carlo estimators can importance sample the contribution of a VRL along an entire sensor subpath, render time still scales linearly in the number of VRLs. We present a new scalable hierarchial VRL method that preferentially samples VRLs according to their image contribution. Similar to Lightcuts‐based approaches, we derive a tight upper bound on the potential contribution of a VRL that is efficient to compute. Our bound takes into account the sampling probability densities used when estimating VRL contribution. Ours is the first such upper bound formulation, leading to an efficient and scalable rendering technique with only a few intuitive user parameters. We benchmark our approach in scenes with many VRLs, demonstrating improved scalability compared to existing state‐of‐the‐art techniques.     

Solid texture synthesis for heterogeneous translucent materials

We present a method to synthesize solid textures from heterogeneous translucent materials that have a complex pattern and subsurface scattering effect. A solid texture provides consistent texture throughout the volume, so that it can be used to model the texture on an arbitrary geometry. However, solid texture synthesis requires a huge amount of time to generate the volume. Moreover, a synthesized solid texture acquires only the color information from an input exemplar. Therefore, it has been difficult to render the appearance of a translucent object realistically without additional appearance data. In this paper, we introduce a new search method to accelerate synthesizing of solid textures. This method decomposes the candidates in an exemplar into several subgroups and searches for the best similar neighborhood in each decomposed subgroup. We also apply subsurface scattering effects to the shell layer of a synthesized object for realistic rendering of a translucent solid texture. Experimental results show that our rendering method can produce realistic rendering results for various heterogeneous translucent objects. It can also represent cross-sections of an object realistically without reconstructing the texture and surface geometry.     

Progressive Transient Photon Beams

In this work, we introduce a novel algorithm for transient rendering in participating media. Our method is consistent, robust and is able to generate animations of time‐resolved light transport featuring complex caustic light paths in media. We base our method on the observation that the spatial continuity provides an increased coverage of the temporal domain, and generalize photon beams to transient‐state. We extend stead‐state photon beam radiance estimates to include the temporal domain. Then, we develop a progressive variant of our approach which provably converges to the correct solution using finite memory by averaging independent realizations of the estimates with progressively reduced kernel bandwidths. We derive the optimal convergence rates accounting for space and time kernels, and demonstrate our method against previous consistent transient rendering methods for participating media.     

半透明三维物体表面光泽真实感实时渲染方法

针对具有半透明特性玉石的真实感渲染问题,提出一种利用高光层、漫反射层、透射层三层光照模型叠加的解决方法。首先对散射层结合漫反射剖面来模拟半透明玉石的次表面散射效果,提出一种可改变漫反射剖面的散射方法,表达不同种类玉石漫反射剖面的特点;然后对透射层利用预计算的本地厚度贴图结合高斯线性和,实现基于表面厚度光的透射效果,再在能量守恒的基础上与基于微平面的高光反射项进行叠加,得到一个基于三层光照模型的真实感半透明材质表现。实验结果表明,所提出的方法能实现不同种类半透明玉石真实感渲染,且在片面数达160万时可保证30帧/秒的实时效率。     

Adaptive Interleaved Sampling for Interactive High‐Fidelity Rendering

Recent advances have made interactive ray tracing (IRT) possible on consumer desktop machines. These advances have brought about the potential for interactive global illumination (IGI) with enhanced realism through physically based lighting. IGI, unlike IRT, has a much higher computational complexity. Furthermore, since non‐primary rays constitute the majority of the computation, the rays are predominantly incoherent, making impractical many of the methods that have made IRT possible. Two methods that have already shown promise in decreasing the computational time of the GI solution are interleaved sampling and adaptive rendering. Interleaved sampling is a generalized sampling scheme that smoothly blends between regular and irregular sampling while maintaining coherence. Adaptive rendering algorithms adjust rendering quality, non‐uniformally, using a guidance scheme. While adaptive rendering has shown to provide speed‐up when used for off‐line rendering it has not been utilized in IRT due to its naturally incoherent nature. In this paper, we combine adaptive rendering and interleaved sampling within a component‐based solution into a new approach we term adaptive interleaved sampling. This allows us to tailor new adaptive heuristics for interleaved sampling of the individual components of the GI solution significantly improving overall performance. We present a novel component‐based IGI framework for which we achieve interactive frame rates for a range of effects such as indirect diffuse lighting, soft shadows and single scatter homogeneous participating media.