Efficient Hardware Acceleration of Robust Volumetric Light Transport Simulation

Abstract

Efficiently simulating the full range of light effects in arbitrary input scenes that contain participating media is a difficult task. Unified points, beams and paths (UPBP) is an algorithm capable of capturing a wide range of media effects, by combining bidirectional path tracing (BPT) and photon density estimation (PDE) with multiple importance sampling (MIS). A computationally expensive task of UPBP is the MIS weight computation, performed each time a light path is formed. We derive an efficient algorithm to compute the MIS weights for UPBP, which improves over previous work by eliminating the need to iterate over the path vertices. We achieve this by maintaining recursive quantities as subpaths are generated, from which the subpath weights can be computed. In this way, the full path weight can be computed by only using the data cached at the two vertices at the ends of the subpaths. Furthermore, a costly part of PDE is the search for nearby photon points and beams. Previous work has shown that a spatial data structure for photon mapping can be implemented using the hardware‐accelerated bounding volume hierarchy of NVIDIA's RTX GPUs. We show that the same technique can be applied to different types of volumetric PDE and compare the performance of these data structures with the state of the art. Finally, using our new algorithm and data structures we fully implement UPBP on the GPU which we, to the best of our knowledge, are the first to do so.