Scalable Virtual Ray Lights Rendering For Participating Media

Nicolas Vibert, McGill University, Canada
Adrien Gruson, McGill University, Canada
Heine Stokholm, Luxion, Danemark
Troels Mortensen, VIA University College, Danemark
Wojciech Jarosz, Dartmouth College, USA
Toshiya Hachisuka, The University of Tokyo, Japan
Derek Nowrouzezahrai, McGill University, Canada
In EGSR, 2019.

Abstract

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

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Publication

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Code & Data

• Public repository

Cite

@inproceedings{Vibert:2019:ScalableVRL,
  title={Scalable Virtual Ray Lights Rendering for Participating Media},
  author={Vibert, Nicolas and Gruson, Adrien and Stokholm, Heine and Mortensen, Troels and Jarosz, Wojciech and Hachisuka, Toshiya and Nowrouzezahrai, Derek},
  booktitle={Computer Graphics Forum},
  volume={38},
  year={2019},
  doi={10/gf6rx7}
}
							

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