NVIDIA Corporation
USING DIRECTIONAL RADIANCE FOR INTERACTIONS IN PATH TRACING

Abstract:

Disclosed approaches provide for interactions of light transport paths in a virtual environment to share directional radiance when rendering a scene. Directional radiance that may be shared includes outgoing directional radiance of interactions, incoming directional radiance of interactions, and/or information derived therefrom. The shared directional radiance may be used for various purposes, such as computing lighting contributions at one or more interactions of a light transport path, and/or for path guiding. Directional radiance of an interaction may be shared with another interaction when the interaction is sufficiently similar (e.g., in radiance direction) to serve as an approximation of a sample for the other interaction. Sharing directional radiance may provide for online learning of directional radiance, which may build finite element approximations of light fields at the interactions.