Efficient frequency-space methods for light transport caching
Light transport is the method of physically simulating the movement of photons in an environment. Applied to rendering, light travels one last time to a virtual sensor that captures it as an image displayed to an observer. As it travels, light is analysable frequentially to understand how it varies spatially and angularly to accelerate rendering. Recent advances in physically-based realistic rendering have been closing the gap between reality and simulation but the memory and performance costs still preclude the inclusion of the more computationally expensive effects in interactive and real-time applications. Because of this, modern production renderers rely on the ahead-of-time precomputation of data for efficient reuse in the form of offline computational processes and asynchronously distributed procedures. This thesis by publication investigates with two papers the simulation of light transport from a frequency-based perspective for interactive and precomputed real-time applications. We first propose a method for efficiently reusing light path computations over time in interactive Monte Carlo path-traced animation sequences. We leverage to this end the frequency analysis of light transport introduced in previous works, extended to spatial, angular and temporal sampling and reconstruction. Our second method investigates the precomputation of participating volume-to-surface light transport as impulse responses, a compact and efficient frequency-based transport operator. In turn, these operators accelerate by orders of magnitude the computation of multi-scattered volume-to-surface transport in arbitrary, potentially heterogeneous media conditions.
Rendering Light Transport Frequency Analysis Participating Media Adaptive Sampling Filtering Spherical Harmonics