Browsing by Author "Narayanan, P. J."

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Accelerating Hair Rendering by Learning High-Order Scattered Radiance
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2023) KT, Aakash; Jarabo, Adrian; Aliaga, Carlos; Chiang, Matt Jen-Yuan; Maury, Olivier; Hery, Christophe; Narayanan, P. J.; Nam, Giljoo; Ritschel, Tobias; Weidlich, Andrea
    Efficiently and accurately rendering hair accounting for multiple scattering is a challenging open problem. Path tracing in hair takes long to converge while other techniques are either too approximate while still being computationally expensive or make assumptions about the scene. We present a technique to infer the higher order scattering in hair in constant time within the path tracing framework, while achieving better computational efficiency. Our method makes no assumptions about the scene and provides control over the renderer's bias & speedup. We achieve this by training a small multilayer perceptron (MLP) to learn the higher-order radiance online, while rendering progresses. We describe how to robustly train this network and thoroughly analyze our resulting renderer's characteristics. We evaluate our method on various hairstyles and lighting conditions. We also compare our method against a recent learning based & a traditional real-time hair rendering method and demonstrate better quantitative & qualitative results. Our method achieves a significant improvement in speed with respect to path tracing, achieving a run-time reduction of 40%-70% while only introducing a small amount of bias.
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    Fast Analytic Soft Shadows from Area Lights
    (The Eurographics Association, 2021) Kt, Aakash; Sakurikar, Parikshit; Narayanan, P. J.; Bousseau, Adrien and McGuire, Morgan
    In this paper, we present the first method to analytically compute shading and soft shadows for physically based BRDFs from arbitrary area lights.We observe that for a given shading point, shadowed radiance can be computed by analytically integrating over the visible portion of the light source using Linearly Transformed Cosines (LTCs). We present a structured approach to project, re-order and horizon-clip spherical polygons of arbitrary lights and occluders. The visible portion is then computed by multiple repetitive set difference operations. Our method produces noise-free shading and soft-shadows and outperforms raytracing within the same compute budget. We further optimize our algorithm for convex light and occluder meshes by projecting the silhouette edges as viewed from the shading point to a spherical polygon, and performing one set difference operation thereby achieving a speedup of more than 2x. We analyze the run-time performance of our method and show rendering results on several scenes with multiple light sources and complex occluders. We demonstrate superior results compared to prior work that uses analytic shading with stochastic shadow computation for area lights.
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    Transfer Textures for Fast Precomputed Radiance Transfer
    (The Eurographics Association, 2022) Dhawal, Sirikonda; Kt, Aakash; Narayanan, P. J.; Sauvage, Basile; Hasic-Telalovic, Jasminka
    Precomputed Radiance Transfer (PRT) can achieve high-quality renders of glossy materials at real-time framerates. PRT involves precomputing a k-dimensional transfer vector or a k×k- matrix of Spherical Harmonic (SH) coefficients at specific points for a scene depending on whether the material is diffuse or glossy respectively. Most prior art precomputes values at vertices of the mesh and interpolates color for interior points. They require finer mesh tessellations for high-quality renders. In this work, we introduce transfer textures for decoupling mesh resolution from transfer storage and sampling specifically benefiting the glossy renders. Dense sampling of the transfer is possible on the fragment shader while rendering with the use of transfer textures for both diffuse as well as glossy materials, even with a low tessellation. This simultaneously provides high render quality and frame rates.