Path-Traced Motion Blur using Motion Trees

Abstract

Motion Blur is an important effect of photo-realistic rendering. Distribution ray tracing can simulate motion blur very well by integrating light, both over the spatial and the temporal domain. However, increasing the problem by the temporal dimension entails many challenges, particularly in cinematic multi-bounce path tracing of complex scenes where heavy-weight geometry with complex lighting and even offscreen elements contribute to the final image. In particular, for fast moving objects, undersampling in the time domain results in severe artefacts. In this paper, we propose the Motion Tree, a novel Level-of-Detail data structure for efficient handling of animated objects, that both filters in the spatial and the temporal domain. The Motion Tree is a compact nesting of a temporal interval binary tree for filtering time consecutive data and a sparse voxel octree (SVO) which simplifies spatially nearby data. It is generated during a pre-process and fits nicely into any conventional physically based path tracer. When used in a production-scale environment it significantly reduces memory requirements allowing for a speedup in rendering performance with user control over the degree of impact on quality.