Browsing by Author "Dachsbacher, Carsten"

Now showing 1 - 12 of 12
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    Guiding Light Trees for Many-Light Direct Illumination
    (The Eurographics Association, 2023) Hamann, Eric; Jung, Alisa; Dachsbacher, Carsten; Babaei, Vahid; Skouras, Melina
    Path guiding techniques reduce the variance in path tracing by reusing knowledge from previous samples to build adaptive sampling distributions. The Practical Path Guiding (PPG) approach stores and iteratively refines an approximation of the incident radiance field in a spatio-directional data structure that allows sampling the incident radiance. However, due to the limited resolution in both spatial and directional dimensions, this discrete approximation is not able to accurately capture a large number of very small lights. We present an emitter sampling technique to guide next event estimation (NEE) with a global light tree and adaptive tree cuts that integrates into the PPG framework. In scenes with many lights our technique significantly reduces the RMSE compared to PPG with uniform NEE, while adding close to no overhead in scenes with few light sources. The results show that our technique can also aid the incident radiance learning of PPG in scenes with difficult visibility.
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    Improving Spectral Upsampling with Fluorescence
    (The Eurographics Association, 2020) König, Lars; Jung, Alisa; Dachsbacher, Carsten; Klein, Reinhard and Rushmeier, Holly
    Modern photorealistic rendering simulates spectral behaviour of light. Since many assets are still created in different RGB color spaces, spectral upsampling of the RGB colors to a spectral representation is required to use them in a spectral renderer. Limiting the upsampled spectra to physically valid and natural, i.e. smooth, spectra results in a more realistic image, but decreases the size of the gamut of colors that can be recreated. In order to upsample wide gamut color spaces with colors outside the gamut of physically valid reflectance spectra, a previous approach added fluorescence to create accurate and physically valid representations. We extend this approach to increase the realism and accuarcy while considering memory and computation time.
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    Markov Chain Mixture Models for Real-Time Direct Illumination
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2023) Dittebrandt, Addis; Schüßler, Vincent; Hanika, Johannes; Herholz, Sebastian; Dachsbacher, Carsten; Ritschel, Tobias; Weidlich, Andrea
    We present a novel technique to efficiently render complex direct illumination in real-time. It is based on a spatio-temporal randomized mixture model of von Mises-Fisher (vMF) distributions in screen space. For every pixel we determine the vMF distribution to sample from using a Markov chain process which is targeted to capture important features of the integrand. By this we avoid the storage overhead of finite-component deterministic mixture models, for which, in addition, determining the optimal component count is challenging. We use stochastic multiple importance sampling (SMIS) to be independent of the equilibrium distribution of our Markov chain process, since it cancels out in the estimator. Further, we use the same sample to advance the Markov chain and to construct the SMIS estimator and local Markov chain state permutations avoid the resulting bias due to dependent sampling. As a consequence we require one ray per sample and pixel only. We evaluate our technique using implementations in a research renderer as well as a classic game engine with highly dynamic content. Our results show that it is efficient and quickly readapts to dynamic conditions. We compare to spatio-temporal resampling (ReSTIR), which can suffer from correlation artifacts due to its non-adapting candidate distributions that can deviate strongly from the integrand.While we focus on direct illumination, our approach is more widely applicable and we exemplarily show the rendering of caustics.
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    Out-of-the-loop Autotuning of Metropolis Light Transport with Reciprocal Probability Binning
    (The Eurographics Association, 2023) Herveau, Killian; Otsu, Hisanari; Dachsbacher, Carsten; Babaei, Vahid; Skouras, Melina
    The performance of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) rendering methods depends heavily on the mutation strategies and their parameters. We treat the underlying mutation strategies as black-boxes and focus on their parameters. This avoids the need for tedious manual parameter tuning and enables automatic adaptation to the actual scene. We propose a framework for out-of-the-loop autotuning of these parameters. As a pilot example, we demonstrate our tuning strategy for small-step mutations in Primary Sample Space Metropolis Light Transport. Our σ-binning strategy introduces a set of mutation parameters chosen by a heuristic: the inverse probability of the local direction sampling, which captures some characteristics of the local sampling. We show that our approach can successfully control the parameters and achieve better performance compared to non-adaptive mutation strategies.
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    Procedural Physically based BRDF for Real-Time Rendering of Glints
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2020) Chermain, Xavier; Sauvage, Basile; Dischler, Jean-Michel; Dachsbacher, Carsten; Eisemann, Elmar and Jacobson, Alec and Zhang, Fang-Lue
    Physically based rendering of glittering surfaces is a challenging problem in computer graphics. Several methods have proposed off-line solutions, but none is dedicated to high-performance graphics. In this work, we propose a novel physically based BRDF for real-time rendering of glints. Our model can reproduce the appearance of sparkling materials (rocks, rough plastics, glitter fabrics, etc.). Compared to the previous real-time method [ZK16], which is not physically based, our BRDF uses normalized NDFs and converges to the standard microfacet BRDF [CT82] for a large number of microfacets. Our method procedurally computes NDFs with hundreds of sharp lobes. It relies on a dictionary of 1D marginal distributions: at each location two of them are randomly picked and multiplied (to obtain a NDF), rotated (to increase the variety), and scaled (to control standard deviation/roughness). The dictionary is multiscale, does not depend on roughness, and has a low memory footprint (less than 1 MiB)
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    Rendering 2020 CGF 39-4: Frontmatter
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2020) Dachsbacher, Carsten; Pharr, Matt; Dachsbacher, Carsten and Pharr, Matt
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    Rendering 2020 DL Track: Frontmatter
    (The Eurographics Association, 2020) Dachsbacher, Carsten; Pharr, Matt; Dachsbacher, Carsten and Pharr, Matt
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    Spectral Mollification for Bidirectional Fluorescence
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2020) Jung, Alisa; Hanika, Johannes; Dachsbacher, Carsten; Panozzo, Daniele and Assarsson, Ulf
    Fluorescent materials can shift energy between wavelengths, thereby creating bright and saturated colors both in natural and artificial materials. However, rendering fluorescence for continuous wavelengths or combined with wavelength dependent path configurations so far has only been feasible using spectral unidirectional methods. We present a regularization-based approach for supporting fluorescence in a spectral bidirectional path tracer. Our algorithm samples camera and light sub-paths with independent wavelengths, and when connecting them mollifies the BSDF at one of the connecting vertices such that it reradiates light across multiple wavelengths. We discuss arising issues such as color bias in early iterations, consistency of the method and MIS weights in the presence of spectral mollification. We demonstrate our method in scenes combining fluorescence and transport phenomena that are difficult to render with unidirectional or spectrally discrete methods.
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    Temporal Normal Distribution Functions
    (The Eurographics Association, 2020) Tessari, Lorenzo; Hanika, Johannes; Dachsbacher, Carsten; Droske, Marc; Dachsbacher, Carsten and Pharr, Matt
    Specular aliasing can make seemingly simple scenes notoriously hard to render efficiently: small geometric features with high curvature and near specular reflectance result in tiny lighting features which are difficult to resolve at low sample counts per pixel. LEAN and LEADR mapping can be used to convert geometric surface detail to anisotropic surface roughness in a preprocess. In scenes including fluid simulation this problem is particularly apparent with fast moving elements such as spray particles, which are typically represented as participating media in movie rendering. Both approaches, however, are only valid in the far-field regime where the geometric detail is much smaller than a pixel, while the challenge of resolving highlights remains in the meso-scale. Fast motion and the relatively long shutter intervals, commonly used in movie production, lead to strong variation of the surface normals seen under a pixel over time aggravating the problem. Recent specular anti aliasing approaches preintegrate geometric curvature under the pixel footprint for one specific ray to achieve noise free images at low sample counts. We extend these to anisotropic surface roughness and to account for the temporal surface normal variation due to motion blur. We use temporal derivatives to approximate the distribution of the surface normal seen under a pixel over the course of the shutter interval. Furthermore, we discuss how this can afterwards be combined with the surface BSDF in a practical way.
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    Temporal Sample Reuse for Next Event Estimation and Path Guiding for Real-Time Path Tracing
    (The Eurographics Association, 2020) Dittebrandt, Addis; Hanika, Johannes; Dachsbacher, Carsten; Dachsbacher, Carsten and Pharr, Matt
    Good importance sampling is crucial for real-time path tracing where only low sample budgets are possible. We present two efficient sampling techniques tailored for massively-parallel GPU path tracing which improve next event estimation (NEE) for rendering with many light sources and sampling of indirect illumination. As sampling densities need to vary spatially, we use an octree structure in world space and introduce algorithms to continuously adapt the partitioning and distribution of the sampling budget. Both sampling techniques exploit temporal coherence by reusing samples from the previous frame: For NEE we collect sampled, unoccluded light sources and show how to deduplicate, but also diffuse this information to efficiently sample light sources in the subsequent frame. For sampling indirect illumination, we present a compressed directional quadtree structure which is iteratively adapted towards high-energy directions using samples from the previous frame. The updates and rebuilding of all data structures takes about 1ms in our test scenes, and adds about 6ms at 1080p to the path tracing time compared to using state-of-the-art light hierarchies and BRDF sampling. We show that this additional effort reduces noise in terms of mean squared error by at least one order of magnitude in many situations.
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    Versatile Geometric Flow Visualization by Controllable Shape and Volumetric Appearance
    (The Eurographics Association, 2022) Zeidan, Mahmoud; Peters, Christoph; Rapp, Tobias; Dachsbacher, Carsten; Cabiddu, Daniela; Schneider, Teseo; Allegra, Dario; Catalano, Chiara Eva; Cherchi, Gianmarco; Scateni, Riccardo
    We present a novel visualization technique for geometry-based visualization of vector fields. Our approach generalizes and combines several existing approaches in a flexible framework using a scalable GPU-accelerated implementation. We map characteristic lines to a variety of glyphs. The user can define multiple cross-sectional shapes that will be used for extrusion. Our system interpolates between these shapes as requested, either based on attributes of the vector field and the characteristic lines or using global user-controlled parameters. Thus, a single characteristic line can use different cross-sectional shapes in different parts to aid the visualization of different phenomena. Transitions can be smooth or discrete and we support highlighting of silhouettes. Additionally, we track and visualize the rotation in the vector field and offer full control of the color mapping, the opacity and the radii along the characteristic lines. Texture-based approaches such as 3D line integral convolution (3D LIC) offer another avenue to vector field visualization. In 3D, they typically rely on sparsely placed seed points. We emulate their appearance with our geometry-based approach through an approximation of the volume integral within our glyphs. Combined with fast order-independent transparency, our GPU implementation achieves fast rendering, even at high resolutions, while keeping the memory footprint moderate.
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    Visualizing Transport and Mixing in Particle-based Fluid Flows
    (The Eurographics Association, 2019) Rapp, Tobias; Dachsbacher, Carsten; Schulz, Hans-Jörg and Teschner, Matthias and Wimmer, Michael
    To gain insight into large, time-dependent particle-based fluid flows, we visually analyze Lagrangian coherent structures (LCS), a robust skeleton of the underlying particle dynamics. To identify these coherent structures, we build on recent work that efficiently computes the finite-time Lyapunov exponent (FTLE) directly on particle data. We formulate the LCS definitions for particles based on robust approximations for higher-order derivatives of the FTLE. Based on these formulations, we derive a per-particle distance to the closest coherent structure. This allows us to visually analyze and explore the Lagrangian transport behavior directly on the particle data. We show that this is especially beneficial to detect and visualize flow features on different time scales. Lastly, we apply our approach to study mixing in multiphase flows by visualizing the different types of fluids and their relation to the coherent structures.