Micro-Rendering for Scalable, Parallel Final Gathering, SIGGRAPH Asia 2009

Micro-Rendering for Scalable, Parallel Final Gathering

Tobias Ritschel¹ Thomas Engelhardt² Thorsten Grosch¹ Hans-Peter Seidel¹ Jan Kautz³ Carsten Dachsbacher²

¹MPI Informatik ²Universität Stuttgart ³University College London

Abstract

Recent approaches to global illumination for dynamic scenes achieve interactive frame-rates by using coarse approximations to geometry, lighting, or both, which limits scene complexity and rendering quality. High-quality global illumination renderings of complex scenes are still limited to methods based on ray tracing. While conceptually simple, these techniques are computationally expensive. We present an efficient and scalable method to compute global illumination solutions at interactive rates for complex and dynamic scenes. It is based on parallel final gathering, running entirely on the GPU. At each final gathering location, we perform micro-rendering: we traverse and rasterize a hierarchical point-based scene representation into an importance-warped micro-buffer, which allows for BRDF importance sampling. The final reflected radiance is computed at each gathering location using the micro-buffers and is then stored in image-space. We can trade quality for speed by reducing the sampling rate of the gathering locations in conjunction with bilateral upsampling. We demonstrate the applicability of our method to interactive global illumination, the simulation of multiple indirect bounces, as well as final gathering from photon maps.

Materials for Download

	The paper (Adobe Acrobat PDF, 8.3 MB).
	The final video (Windows AVI, Xvid, 90.6 MB).
	SIGGRAPH Asia '09 talk slides (MS PowerPoint, 7.9 MB, no videos)

Please note: YouTube only gives a preview of the effect but doesn't reproduce it in professional quality.
For full quality, please download the supplemental material .AVI video (90.6 MB).

Citation

Tobias Ritschel, Thomas Engelhardt, Thorsten Grosch, Hans-Peter Seidel, Jan Kautz, Carsten Dachsbacher
Micro-Rendering for Scalable, Parallel Final Gathering
ACM Trans. Graph. 28 (5) (Proc. SIGGRAPH Asia 2009)

  @article{Ritschel:2009:Microrendering,
   author    = {Tobias Ritschel and
                Thomas Engelhardt and   
                Thorsten Grosch and                
                Hans-Peter Seidel and
                Jan Kautz and
                Carsten Dachsbacher
               },
   title     = {Micro-Rendering for Scalable, Parallel Final Gathering},
   journal   = {ACM Trans. Graph. (Proc. SIGGRAPH Asia 2009)},
   year      = {2009},
   volume    = {28},
   number    = {5}
  }

Acknowledgements

This work has been partially funded ...
We thank

all reviewers for their helpful suggestions,
Michael Wand and Elmar Eisemann for the internal review
Robert Strzodka for a very much acknowledged discussion
Robert Herzog, Zhao Dong for discussion
Mesh animations from Robert W. Sumner, Jovan Popovic. Deformation Transfer for Triangle Meshes. ACM Trans. Graph. 23(3) (Proc. SIGGRAPH) August 2004
Dragon and Buddha model from The Stanford 3D Scanning Repository