Rendering Participating Media with Bidirectional Path Tracing

Accelerated Light Propagation Through Participating Media

Monte Carlo path tracing is a simple and effective way to solve the volume rendering equation. However, propagating light paths through participating media can be very costly because of the need to simulate potentially many scattering events. This paper presents a simple technique to accelerate path tracing of homogeneous participating media. We use a traditional path tracer for scattering near...

Gradient-Domain Bidirectional Path Tracing

Gradient-domain path tracing has recently been introduced as an efficient realistic image synthesis algorithm. This paper introduces a bidirectional gradient-domain sampler that outperforms traditional bidirectional path tracing often by a factor of two to five in terms of squared error at equal render time. It also improves over unidirectional gradient-domain path tracing in challenging visibi...

Combining Bidirectional Path Tracing and Multipass Rendering

A Bidirectional Path Tracing Method for Global Illumination Rendering on GPU

This article proposes a new method for synthetic images rendering with Global Illumination on Graphics Processing Units (GPU). The method is based on Bidirectional Path Tracing in which we truncated path lenghts to improve GPU performance and introduced a number of Virtual Light Points to organize the Light Tracing pass. Results shows that a rendered image is accurate if confronted with the cor...

Flux-Limited Diffusion for Multiple Scattering in Participating Media

For the rendering of multiple scattering effects in participating media, methods based on the diffusion approximation are an extremely efficient alternative to Monte Carlo path tracing. However, in sufficiently transparent regions, classical diffusion approximation suffers from non-physical radiative fluxes which leads to a poor match to correct light transport. In particular, this prevents the...