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Radiance caching for participating media

Published: 20 March 2008 Publication History

Abstract

In this article we present a novel radiance caching method for efficiently rendering participating media using Monte Carlo ray tracing. Our method handles all types of light scattering including anisotropic scattering, and it works in both homogeneous and heterogeneous media. A key contribution in the article is a technique for computing gradients of radiance evaluated in participating media. These gradients take the full path of the scattered light into account including the changing properties of the medium in the case of heterogeneous media. The gradients can be computed simultaneously with the inscattered radiance with negligible overhead. We compute gradients for single scattering from lights and surfaces and for multiple scattering, and we use a spherical harmonics representation in media with anisotropic scattering. Our second contribution is a new radiance caching scheme for participating media. This caching scheme uses the information in the radiance gradients to sparsely sample as well as interpolate radiance within the medium utilizing a novel, perceptually based error metric. Our method provides several orders of magnitude speedup compared to path tracing and produces higher quality results than volumetric photon mapping. Furthermore, it is view-driven and well suited for large scenes where methods such as photon mapping become costly.

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cover image ACM Transactions on Graphics
ACM Transactions on Graphics  Volume 27, Issue 1
March 2008
135 pages
ISSN:0730-0301
EISSN:1557-7368
DOI:10.1145/1330511
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 20 March 2008
Accepted: 01 November 2007
Received: 01 June 2007
Published in TOG Volume 27, Issue 1

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Author Tags

  1. Global illumination
  2. Monte Carlo ray tracing
  3. gradients
  4. irradiance caching
  5. participating media
  6. ray marching
  7. rendering
  8. spherical harmonics

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  • (2024)Efficient participating media rendering with differentiable regularizationComputational Visual Media10.1007/s41095-023-0372-210:5(937-948)Online publication date: 7-Oct-2024
  • (2024)Improving cache placement for efficient cache-based renderingThe Visual Computer: International Journal of Computer Graphics10.1007/s00371-023-03231-z40:11(8173-8187)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2024
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  • (2022)Real-Time Denoising of Volumetric Path Tracing for Direct Volume RenderingIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics10.1109/TVCG.2020.303768028:7(2734-2747)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2022
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