Direct Volume Rendering (DVR) using Volumetric Path Tracing (VPT) is a scientific visualization technique that simulates light transport with objects' matter using physically-based lighting models. Monte Carlo (MC) path tracing is often used with surface models, yet its application for volumetric models is difficult due to the complexity of integrating MC light-paths in volumetric media with none or smooth material boundaries. Moreover, auxiliary geometry-buffers (G-buffers) produced for volumes are typically very noisy, failing to guide image denoisers relying on that information to preserve image details. This makes existing real-time denoisers, which take noise-free G-buffers as their input, less effective when denoising VPT images. We propose the necessary modifications to an image-based denoiser previously used when rendering surface models, and demonstrate effective denoising of VPT images. In particular, our denoising exploits temporal coherence between frames, without relying on noise-free G-buffers, which has been a common assumption of existing denoisers for surface-models. Our technique preserves high-frequency details through a weighted recursive least squares that handles heterogeneous noise for volumetric models. We show for various real data sets that our method improves the visual fidelity and temporal stability of VPT during classic DVR operations such as camera movements, modifications of the light sources, and editions to the volume transfer function.
Classically, rasterization techniques are performed for real-time rendering to meet the constraint of interactive frame rates. However, such techniques do not produce realistic results as compared to ray tracing approaches. Hence, hybrid rendering has emerged to improve the graphics fidelity of rasterization with ray tracing in real-time. We explore the approach of distributed rendering in incorporating real-time hybrid rendering into metaverse experiences for immersive graphics. In standalone extended reality (XR) devices, such ray tracing-enabled graphics is only feasible through pure cloud-…
A general concept of 3D volumetric visualization systems is described based on 3D discrete voxel scenes (worlds) representation. Definitions of 3D discrete voxel scene (world) basic elements and main steps of the image synthesis algorithm are formulated. An algorithm for solving the problem of the voxelized world 3D image synthesis, intended for the systems of volumetric spatial visualization, is proposed. A computer-based architecture for 3D volumetric visualization of 3D discrete voxel world is presented. On the basis of the proposed overall concept of discrete voxel representation, the prop…
For a foreground object in motion, details of its background which would otherwise be hidden are uncovered through its inner blur. This paper presents a novel hybrid motion blur rendering technique combining post-process image filtering and hardware-accelerated ray tracing. In each frame, we advance rays recursively into the scene to retrieve background information for inner blur regions and apply a post-process filtering pass on the ray-traced background and rasterized colour before compositing them together. Our approach achieves more accurate partial occlusion semi-transparencies for moving…
We propose an image warping-based remote rendering technique for volumes that decouples the rendering and display phases. Our work builds on prior work that samples the volume on the client using ray casting and reconstructs a z-value based on some heuristic. The color and depth buffer are then sent to the client that reuses this depth image as a stand-in for subsequent frames by warping it according to the current camera position until new data was received from the server. We augment that method by implementing the client renderer using ray tracing. By representing the pixel contributions as…
Accurate subsurface scattering solutions require the integration of optical material properties along many complicated light paths. We present a method that learns a simple geometric approximation of random paths in a homogeneous volume of translucent material. The generated representation allows determining the absorption along the path as well as a direct lighting contribution, which is representative of all scattering events along the path. A sequence of conditional variational auto-encoders (CVAEs) is trained to model the statistical distribution of the photon paths inside a spherical regi…
Motion blur is commonly used in game cinematics to achieve photorealism by modelling the behaviour of the camera shutter and simulating its effect associated with the relative motion of scene objects. A common real-time post-process approach is spatial sampling, where the directional blur of a moving object is rendered by integrating its colour based on velocity information within a single frame. However, such screen space approaches typically cannot produce accurate partial occlusion semi-transparencies. Our real-time hybrid rendering technique leverages hardware-accelerated ray tracing to co…
Ray tracing on GPUs is becoming quite common these days. There are many publicly available documents on how to implement basic ray tracing on GPUs for spheres and implicit surfaces. We even have some general frameworks for ray tracing on GPUs. We however hardly find details on how to implement more complex ray tracing algorithms themselves that are commonly used for photorealistic rendering. This paper explains an implementation of a stand-alone rendering system on GPUs which supports the bounding volume hierarchy and stochastic progressive photon mapping. The key characteristic of the system …
Real-time rendering and animation of humans is a core function in games, movies, and telepresence applications. Existing methods have a number of drawbacks we aim to address with our work. Triangle meshes have difficulty modeling thin structures like hair, volumetric representations like Neural Volumes are too low-resolution given a reasonable memory budget, and high-resolution implicit representations like Neural Radiance Fields are too slow for use in real-time applications. We present Mixture of Volumetric Primitives (MVP), a representation for rendering dynamic 3D content that combines the…
We introduce a novel distributed rendering approach to generate high-quality graphics in thin-client games and VR applications. Many mobile devices have limited computational power to achieve ray tracing in real-time. Hence, hardware-accelerated cloud servers can perform ray tracing instead and have their output streamed to clients in remote rendering. Applying the approach of distributed hybrid rendering, we leverage the computational capabilities of both the thin client and powerful server by performing rasterization locally while offloading ray tracing to the server. With advancements in 5G…
Rendering on conventional computers is capable of generating realistic imagery, but the computational complexity of these light transport algorithms is a limiting factor of image synthesis. Quantum computers have the potential to significantly improve rendering performance through reducing the underlying complexity of the algorithms behind light transport. This paper investigates hybrid quantum-classical algorithms for ray tracing, a core component of most rendering techniques. Through a practical implementation of quantum ray tracing in a 3D environment, we show quantum approaches provide a q…
Probabilistic volumetric mapping (PVM) represents a 3D environmental map for an autonomous robotic navigational task. A popular implementation such as Octomap is widely used in the robotics community for such a purpose. The Octomap relies on octree to represent a PVM and its main bottleneck lies in massive ray-shooting to determine the occupancy of the underlying volumetric voxel grids. In this paper, we propose GPU-based ray shooting to drastically improve the ray shooting performance in Octomap. Our main idea is based on the use of recent ray-tracing RTX GPU, mainly designed for real-time ph…
We present a method for fast 3D reconstruction and real-time rendering of dynamic humans from monocular videos with accompanying parametric body fits. Our method can reconstruct a dynamic human in less than 3h using a single GPU, compared to recent state-of-the-art alternatives that take up to 72h. These speedups are obtained by using a lightweight deformation model solely based on linear blend skinning, and an efficient factorized volumetric representation for modeling the shape and color of the person in canonical pose. Moreover, we propose a novel local ray marching rendering which, by expl…
Ray tracing is a technique for generating an image by tracing the path of light through pixels in an image plane and simulating the effects of high-quality global illumination at a heavy computational cost. Because of the high computation complexity, it can't reach the requirement of real-time rendering. The emergence of many-core architectures, makes it possible to reduce significantly the running time of ray tracing algorithm by employing the powerful ability of floating point computation. In this paper, a new GPU implementation and optimization of the ray tracing to accelerate the rendering…
Background: Visualization of multi-channel microscopy data plays a vital role in biological research. With the ever-increasing resolution of modern microscopes the data set size of the scanned specimen grows steadily. On commodity hardware this size easily exceeds the available main memory and the even more limited GPU memory. Common volume rendering techniques require the entire data set to be present in the GPU memory. Existing out-of-core rendering approaches for large volume data sets either are limited to single-channel volumes, or require a computer cluster, or have long preprocessing ti…
With the introduction of Nvidia RTX hardware, ray tracing is now viable as a general real time rendering technique for complex 3D scenes. Leveraging this new technology, we present Raygun, an open source rendering, simulation, and game engine focusing on simplicity, expandability, and the topic of ray tracing realized through Nvidia's Vulkan ray tracing extension.
Creating realistic virtual assets is a time-consuming process: it usually involves an artist designing the object, then spending a lot of effort on tweaking its appearance. Intricate details and certain effects, such as subsurface scattering, elude representation using real-time BRDFs, making it impossible to fully capture the appearance of certain objects. Inspired by the recent progress of neural rendering, we propose an approach for capturing real-world objects in everyday environments faithfully and fast. We use a novel neural representation to reconstruct volumetric effects, such as trans…
Photorealistic rendering effects are common in films, but most real time graphics today still rely on scan-line based multi-pass rendering to deliver rich visual experiences. While there have been prior works in distributed path tracing for static scene and objects under rigid motion, real time path tracing of deforming characters has to support per-frame dynamic BVH changes. We present the architecture and implementation of the first real-time production quality cluster path tracing renderer that supports film quality animation and deformation. We build our cluster path tracing system using t…
ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学）；Stereye Intelligent Technology Co.,Ltd.（视辰智能科技有限公司）；Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）
Some of the most exciting experiences that Metaverse promises to offer, for instance, live interactions with virtual characters in virtual environments, require real-time photo-realistic rendering. 3D reconstruction approaches to rendering, active or passive, still require extensive cleanup work to fix the meshes or point clouds. In this paper, we present a neural volumography technique called neural volumetric video or NeuVV to support immersive, interactive, and spatial-temporal rendering of volumetric video contents with photo-realism and in real-time. The core of NeuVV is to efficiently en…
Rendering an accurate image of an isosurface in a volumetric field typically requires large numbers of data samples. Reducing the number of required samples lies at the core of research in volume rendering. With the advent of deep learning networks, a number of architectures have been proposed recently to infer missing samples in multi-dimensional fields, for applications such as image super-resolution and scan completion. In this paper, we investigate the use of such architectures for learning the upscaling of a low-resolution sampling of an isosurface to a higher resolution, with high fideli…
Depth of Field (DoF) in games is usually achieved as a post-process effect by blurring pixels in the sharp rasterized image based on the defined focus plane. This paper describes a novel real-time DoF technique that uses ray tracing with image filtering to achieve more accurate partial occlusion semi-transparencies on edges of blurry foreground geometry. This hybrid rendering technique leverages ray tracing hardware acceleration as well as spatio-temporal reconstruction techniques to achieve interactive frame rates.
Direct Volume Rendering is a popular and powerful visualization method for voxel data and other volumetric scalar data sets. Particularly, in medical applications volume rendering is very commonly used, and has become one of the state of the art methods for 3D visualization of medical data. In this article, some of the most common artifacts encountered will be discussed, and their possible remedies.
In this paper, we use an original ray-tracing domain decomposition method to address image rendering of naturally lighted scenes. This new method allows to particularly analyze rendering problems on parallel architectures, in the case of interactions between light-rays and glass material. Numerical experiments, for medieval glass rendering within the church of the Royaumont abbey, illustrate the performance of the proposed ray-tracing domain decomposition method (DDM) on multi-cores and multi-processors architectures. On one hand, applying domain decomposition techniques increases speedups obt…
Sample based ray marching is an effective method for direct volume rendering of unstructured meshes. However, sampling such meshes remains expensive, and strategies to reduce the number of samples taken have received relatively little attention. In this paper, we introduce a method for rendering unstructured meshes using a combination of a coarse spatial acceleration structure and hardware-accelerated ray tracing. Our approach enables efficient empty space skipping and adaptive sampling of unstructured meshes, and outperforms a reference ray marcher by up to 7x.
Rendering realistic images with global illumination is a computationally demanding task and often requires dedicated hardware for feasible runtime. Recent research uses Deep Neural Networks to predict indirect lighting on image level, but such methods are commonly limited to diffuse materials and require training on each scene.We present Deep Radiance Caching (DRC), an efficient variant of Radiance Caching utilizing Convolutional Autoencoders for rendering global illumination. DRC employs a denoising neural network with Radiance Caching to support a wide range of material types, without the re…
While ray tracing has become increasingly common and path tracing is well understood by now, a major challenge lies in crafting an easy-to-use and efficient system implementing these technologies. Following a purely physically-based paradigm while still allowing for artistic workflows, the Iray light transport simulation and rendering system allows for rendering complex scenes by the push of a button and thus makes accurate light transport simulation widely available. In this document we discuss the challenges and implementation choices that follow from our primary design decisions, demonstrat…
ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Google（谷歌）；Peking University（北京大学）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；Microsoft（微软）
We propose a differentiable sphere tracing algorithm to bridge the gap between inverse graphics methods and the recently proposed deep learning based implicit signed distance function. Due to the nature of the implicit function, the rendering process requires tremendous function queries, which is particularly problematic when the function is represented as a neural network. We optimize both the forward and backward passes of our rendering layer to make it run efficiently with affordable memory consumption on a commodity graphics card. Our rendering method is fully differentiable such that loss…
A considerable limitation of employing sparse voxels octrees (SVOs) as a model format for ray tracing has been that the octree data structure is inherently static. Due to traversal algorithms' dependence on the strict hierarchical structure of octrees, it has been challenging to achieve real-time performance of SVO model animation in ray tracing since the octree data structure would typically have to be regenerated every frame. Presented in this article is a novel method for animation of models specified on the SVO format. The method distinguishes itself by permitting model transformations suc…
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Reality Labs Research（现实实验室研究院）；Meta AI
Capturing and rendering life-like hair is particularly challenging due to its fine geometric structure, the complex physical interaction and its non-trivial visual appearance.Yet, hair is a critical component for believable avatars. In this paper, we address the aforementioned problems: 1) we use a novel, volumetric hair representation that is com-posed of thousands of primitives. Each primitive can be rendered efficiently, yet realistically, by building on the latest advances in neural rendering. 2) To have a reliable control signal, we present a novel way of tracking hair on the strand level…
