skip to main content
research-article

Unifying points, beams, and paths in volumetric light transport simulation

Published: 27 July 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Efficiently computing light transport in participating media in a manner that is robust to variations in media density, scattering albedo, and anisotropy is a difficult and important problem in realistic image synthesis. While many specialized rendering techniques can efficiently resolve subsets of transport in specific media, no single approach can robustly handle all types of effects. To address this problem we unify volumetric density estimation, using point and beam estimators, and Monte Carlo solutions to the path integral formulation of the rendering and radiative transport equations. We extend multiple importance sampling to correctly handle combinations of these fundamentally different classes of estimators. This, in turn, allows us to develop a single rendering algorithm that correctly combines the benefits and mediates the limitations of these powerful volume rendering techniques.

Supplementary Material

ZIP File (a103-krivanek.zip)
Supplemental material.

References

[1]
Arvo, J., and Kirk, D. 1990. Particle transport and image synthesis. In Proc. of SIGGRAPH '90, ACM, New York, NY.
[2]
Arvo, J. 1993. Transfer functions in global illumination. In ACM SIGGRAPH 93 Course Notes - Global Illumination.
[3]
Banerjee, K. 2010. Kernel Density Estimator Methods for Monte Carlo Radiation Transport. PhD thesis, University of Michigan.
[4]
Davidovič, T., and Georgiev, I., 2012. SmallVCM. http://www.smallvcm.com/.
[5]
D'Eon, E., and Irving, G. 2011. A quantized-diffusion model for rendering translucent materials. ACM Trans. Graph. (Proc. of SIGGRAPH) 30, 4.
[6]
Dunn, K., and Wilson, P. 2012. Kernel density estimators for Monte Carlo tallies on unstructured meshes. Transactions of the American Nuclear Society 107, 490--493.
[7]
Georgiev, I., Křivánek, J., Davidovič, T., and Slusallek, P. 2012. Light transport simulation with vertex connection and merging. ACM Trans. Graph. (Proc. of SIGGRAPH Asia) 31, 6.
[8]
Georgiev, I., Křivánek, J., Hachisuka, T., Nowrouzezahrai, D., and Jarosz, W. 2013. Joint importance sampling of low-order volumetric scattering. ACM Trans. Graph. (Proc. of SIGGRAPH Asia) 32, 6 (Nov.).
[9]
Gkioulekas, I., Zhao, S., Bala, K., Zickler, T., and Levin, A. 2013. Inverse volume rendering with material dictionaries. ACM Trans. Graph. 32, 6 (Nov.), 162:1--162:13.
[10]
Hachisuka, T., Ogaki, S., and Jensen, H. W. 2008. Progressive photon mapping. ACM Trans. Graph. (Proc. of SIGGRAPH Asia) 27, 5.
[11]
Hachisuka, T., Pantaleoni, J., and Jensen, H. W. 2012. A path space extension for robust light transport simulation. ACM Trans. Graph. (Proc. of SIGGRAPH Asia) 31, 6 (Nov.).
[12]
Hachisuka, T., Kaplanyan, A. S., and Dachsbacher, C. 2014. Multiplexed Metropolis light transport. ACM Trans. Graph. (Proc. of SIGGRAPH 2014) 33, 4.
[13]
Immel, D. S., Cohen, M. F., and Greenberg, D. P. 1986. A radiosity method for non-diffuse environments. ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics 20, 4, 133--142.
[14]
Jarosz, W., Zwicker, M., and Jensen, H. W. 2008. The beam radiance estimate for volumetric photon mapping. Computer Graphics Forum (Proc. of Eurographics) 27, 2.
[15]
Jarosz, W., Nowrouzezahrai, D., Sadeghi, I., and Jensen, H. W. 2011. A comprehensive theory of volumetric radiance estimation using photon points and beams. ACM Trans. Graph. 30, 1, 5:1--5:19.
[16]
Jarosz, W., Nowrouzezahrai, D., Thomas, R., Sloan, P.-P., and Zwicker, M. 2011. Progressive photon beams. ACM Trans. Graph. (Proc. of SIGGRAPH Asia) 30, 6.
[17]
Jensen, H. W., and Christensen, P. H. 1998. Efficient simulation of light transport in scenes with participating media using photon maps. In Proc. of SIGGRAPH '98.
[18]
Jensen, H. W. 1996. Global illumination using photon maps. In Proc. of Eurographics Rendering Workshop.
[19]
Kajiya, J. T. 1986. The rendering equation. In Computer Graphics (Proc. of SIGGRAPH).
[20]
Knaus, C., and Zwicker, M. 2011. Progressive photon mapping: A probabilistic approach. ACM Transactions on Graphics 30, 3.
[21]
Lafortune, E. P., and Willems, Y. D. 1993. Bi-directional path tracing. In Compugraphics '93.
[22]
Lafortune, E. P., and Willems, Y. D. 1996. Rendering participating media with bidirectional path tracing. In Proc. of the Eurographics Workshop on Rendering.
[23]
MacMillan, D. B. 1966. Comparison of statistical estimators for neutron Monte Carlo calculations. Nuclear Science and Engineering 26, 3 (Nov.), 366--372.
[24]
Novák, J., Nowrouzezahrai, D., Dachsbacher, C., and Jarosz, W. 2012. Progressive virtual beam lights. Proc. of Eurographics Symposium on Rendering 31, 4 (June).
[25]
Novák, J., Nowrouzezahrai, D., Dachsbacher, C., and Jarosz, W. 2012. Virtual ray lights for rendering scenes with participating media. ACM Trans. Graph. (Proc. of SIGGRAPH) 31, 4 (July).
[26]
Pauly, M., Kollig, T., and Keller, A. 2000. Metropolis light transport for participating media. In Rendering Techniques (Proc. of Eurographics Workshop on Rendering).
[27]
Spanier, J., and Gelbard, E. M. 1969. Monte Carlo principles and neutron transport problems. Addison-Wesley.
[28]
Spanier, J. 1966. Two pairs of families of estimators for transport problems. SIAM Journal on Applied Mathematics 14, 4, 702--713.
[29]
Veach, E., and Guibas, L. 1994. Bidirectional estimators for light transport. In Proc. of Eurographics Rendering Workshop.
[30]
Veach, E., and Guibas, L. J. 1995. Optimally combining sampling techniques for Monte Carlo rendering. In Proc. of SIGGRAPH '95.
[31]
Veach, E. 1997. Robust Monte Carlo methods for light transport simulation. PhD thesis, Stanford, CA, USA.
[32]
Vorba, J. 2011. Bidirectional photon mapping. In Proc. of the Central European Seminar on Computer Graphics (CESCG '11).

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)DARTS: Diffusion Approximated Residual Time Sampling for Time-of-flight Rendering in Homogeneous Scattering MediaACM Transactions on Graphics10.1145/368793043:6(1-14)Online publication date: 19-Dec-2024
  • (2024)Photon-Driven Manifold SamplingProceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques10.1145/36753757:3(1-16)Online publication date: 9-Aug-2024
  • (2024)Bridge Sampling for Connections via Multiple Scattering EventsComputer Graphics Forum10.1111/cgf.1516043:4Online publication date: 24-Jul-2024
  • Show More Cited By

Index Terms

  1. Unifying points, beams, and paths in volumetric light transport simulation

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Information & Contributors

    Information

    Published In

    cover image ACM Transactions on Graphics
    ACM Transactions on Graphics  Volume 33, Issue 4
    July 2014
    1366 pages
    ISSN:0730-0301
    EISSN:1557-7368
    DOI:10.1145/2601097
    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 the author(s) 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].

    Publisher

    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 27 July 2014
    Published in TOG Volume 33, Issue 4

    Permissions

    Request permissions for this article.

    Check for updates

    Author Tags

    1. bidirectional path tracing
    2. global illumination
    3. light transport
    4. participating media
    5. photon beams
    6. photon mapping

    Qualifiers

    • Research-article

    Funding Sources

    Contributors

    Other Metrics

    Bibliometrics & Citations

    Bibliometrics

    Article Metrics

    • Downloads (Last 12 months)44
    • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)4
    Reflects downloads up to 17 Jan 2025

    Other Metrics

    Citations

    Cited By

    View all
    • (2024)DARTS: Diffusion Approximated Residual Time Sampling for Time-of-flight Rendering in Homogeneous Scattering MediaACM Transactions on Graphics10.1145/368793043:6(1-14)Online publication date: 19-Dec-2024
    • (2024)Photon-Driven Manifold SamplingProceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques10.1145/36753757:3(1-16)Online publication date: 9-Aug-2024
    • (2024)Bridge Sampling for Connections via Multiple Scattering EventsComputer Graphics Forum10.1111/cgf.1516043:4Online publication date: 24-Jul-2024
    • (2024)Neural SSS: Lightweight Object Appearance RepresentationComputer Graphics Forum10.1111/cgf.1515843:4Online publication date: 24-Jul-2024
    • (2024)Photon Field Networks for Dynamic Real-Time Volumetric Global IlluminationIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics10.1109/TVCG.2023.332710730:1(975-985)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2024
    • (2024)Efficient participating media rendering with differentiable regularizationComputational Visual Media10.1007/s41095-023-0372-210:5(937-948)Online publication date: 7-Oct-2024
    • (2023)Photon flow: A three-dimensional expression of the light field using volume photon mappingLighting Research & Technology10.1177/1477153522114567255:3(300-320)Online publication date: 21-Jan-2023
    • (2023)Revisiting controlled mixture sampling for rendering applicationsACM Transactions on Graphics10.1145/359243542:4(1-13)Online publication date: 26-Jul-2023
    • (2023)Deep Real-time Volumetric Rendering Using Multi-feature FusionACM SIGGRAPH 2023 Conference Proceedings10.1145/3588432.3591493(1-10)Online publication date: 23-Jul-2023
    • (2023)Efficient Hardware Acceleration of Robust Volumetric Light Transport SimulationComputer Graphics Forum10.1111/cgf.1480242:6Online publication date: 27-Apr-2023
    • Show More Cited By

    View Options

    Login options

    Full Access

    View options

    PDF

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader

    Media

    Figures

    Other

    Tables

    Share

    Share

    Share this Publication link

    Share on social media