Abstract
We combine state-of-the-art techniques into a system for high-quality, interactive rendering of participating media. We leverage unbiased volume path tracing with multiple scattering, temporally stable neural denoising and NanoVDB [Museth 2021], a fast, sparse voxel tree data structure for the GPU, to explore what performance and image quality can be obtained for rendering volumetric data. Additionally, we integrate neural adaptive sampling to significantly improve image quality at a fixed sample budget. Our system runs at interactive rates at 1920 × 1080 on a single GPU and produces high quality results for complex dynamic volumes.
Supplemental Material
Available for Download
Supplemental movie, appendix, image and software files for, Interactive Path Tracing and Reconstruction of Sparse Volumes
- Timo Aila and Samuli Laine. 2009. Understanding the efficiency of ray traversal on GPUs. In Proceedings of the conference on High Performance Graphics 2009. 145--149.Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Steve Bako, Thijs Vogels, Brian McWilliams, Mark Meyer, Jan Novák, Alex Harvill, Pradeep Sen, Tony Derose, and Fabrice Rousselle. 2017. Kernel-predicting convolutional networks for denoising Monte Carlo renderings. ACM Trans. Graph. 36, 4(2017), 97--1.Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Fabian Bauer. 2019. Creating the Atmospheric World of Red Dead Redemption 2: A Complete and Integrated Solution. In ACM SIGGRAPH.Google Scholar
- Nir Benty, Kai-Hwa Yao, Petrik Clarberg, Lucy Chen, Simon Kallweit, Tim Foley, Matthew Oakes, Conor Lavelle, and Chris Wyman. 2020. The Falcor Rendering Framework. https://github.com/NVIDIAGameWorks/Falcor https://github.com/NVIDIAGameWorks/Falcor.Google Scholar
- Chakravarty R Alla Chaitanya, Anton S Kaplanyan, Christoph Schied, Marco Salvi, Aaron Lefohn, Derek Nowrouzezahrai, and Timo Aila. 2017. Interactive reconstruction of Monte Carlo image sequences using a recurrent denoising autoencoder. ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG) 36, 4 (2017), 1--12.Google Scholar
Digital Library
- S Chandrasekar. 1960. Radiative Transfer Dover Publications. New York (1960).Google Scholar
- Jiawen Chen, Ilya Baran, Frédo Durand, and Wojciech Jarosz. 2011. Real-time volumetric shadows using 1D min-max mipmaps. In Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games. 39--46.Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Petrik Clarberg, Wojciech Jarosz, Tomas Akenine-Möller, and Henrik Wann Jensen. 2005. Wavelet importance sampling: efficiently evaluating products of complex functions. In ACM SIGGRAPH 2005 Papers. 1166--1175.Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Cyril Delalandre, Pascal Gautron, Jean-Eudes Marvie, and Guillaume François. 2011. Transmittance Function Mapping. In Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games (San Francisco, California) (I3D '11). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 31--38. https://doi.org/10.1145/1944745.1944751Google Scholar
- Robert H Dicke, P James E Peebles, Peter G Roll, and David T Wilkinson. 1965. Cosmic Black-Body Radiation. The Astrophysical Journal 142 (1965), 414--419.Google Scholar
Cross Ref
- DisneyAnimation. 2020. A large and highly detailed volumetric cloud data set. https://www.disneyanimation.com/datasets/?drawer=/resources/clouds/ Acessed: 2020--12--10.Google Scholar
- Thomas Engelhardt and Carsten Dachsbacher. 2010. Epipolar sampling for shadows and crepuscular rays in participating media with single scattering. In Proceedings of the 2010 ACM SIGGRAPH symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games. 119--125.Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Manfred Ernst, Marc Stamminger, and Gunther Greiner. 2006. Filter importance sampling. In 2006 IEEE Symposium on Interactive Ray Tracing. IEEE, 125--132.Google Scholar
Cross Ref
- Mathieu Galtier, Stephane Blanco, Cyril Caliot, Christophe Coustet, Jérémi Dauchet, Mouna El Hafi, Vincent Eymet, Richard Fournier, Jacques Gautrais, Anais Khuong, et al. 2013. Integral formulation of null-collision Monte Carlo algorithms. Journal of Quantitative Spectroscopy and Radiative Transfer 125 (2013), 57--68.Google Scholar
Cross Ref
- Pascal Gautron, Cyril Delalandre, and Jean-Eudes Marvie. 2011. Extinction transmittance maps. In SIGGRAPH Asia 2011 Sketches. 1--2.Google Scholar
- Iliyan Georgiev, Thiago Ize, Mike Farnsworth, Ramón Montoya-Vozmediano, Alan King, Brecht Van Lommel, Angel Jimenez, Oscar Anson, Shinji Ogaki, Eric Johnston, et al. 2018. Arnold: A brute-force production path tracer. ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG) 37, 3 (2018), 1--12.Google Scholar
Digital Library
- J Hasselgren, J Munkberg, M Salvi, A Patney, and A Lefohn. 2020. Neural Temporal Adaptive Sampling and Denoising. In Computer Graphics Forum, Vol. 39. Wiley Online Library, 147--155.Google Scholar
- HDRI Haven. 2020. Free HDRIs for Everyone. https://hdrihaven.com/ Acessed: 2020--12--10.Google Scholar
- Louis G Henyey and Jesse L Greenstein. 1941. Diffuse radiation in the galaxy. The Astrophysical Journal 93 (1941), 70--83.Google Scholar
Cross Ref
- Sébastien Hillaire. 2015. Physically Based and Unified Volumetric Rendering in Frostbite. SIGGRAPH Advances in Real-Time Rendering course (2015), 570--610.Google Scholar
- Nikolai Hofmann, Jana Martschinke, Klaus Engel, and Marc Stamminger. 2020. Neural Denoising for Path Tracing of Medical Volumetric Data. Proceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques 3, 2 (2020), 1--18.Google Scholar
Digital Library
- JangaFX. 2020. Download Free VDB Animations: Explosions, Fire, And More! https://jangafx.com/software/embergen/download/free-vdb-animations/ Acessed: 2020--12--10.Google Scholar
- James T Kajiya. 1986. The rendering equation. In Proceedings of the 13th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques. 143--150.Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Simon Kallweit, Thomas Müller, Brian Mcwilliams, Markus Gross, and Jan Novák. 2017. Deep scattering: Rendering atmospheric clouds with radiance-predicting neural networks. ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG) 36, 6 (2017), 1--11.Google Scholar
Digital Library
- B Karis. 2014. High quality temporal anti-aliasing. Advances in Real-Time Rendering for Games, SIGGRAPH Courses (2014).Google Scholar
- Peter Kutz, Ralf Habel, Yining Karl Li, and Jan Novák. 2017. Spectral and decomposition tracking for rendering heterogeneous volumes. ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG) 36, 4 (2017), 1--16.Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Alexandr Kuznetsov, Nima Khademi Kalantari, and Ravi Ramamoorthi. 2018. Deep Adaptive Sampling for Low Sample Count Rendering. Computer Graphics Forum 37 (2018), 35--44.Google Scholar
Cross Ref
- Sébastien Lagarde and Evgenii Golubev. 2018. The Road toward Unified Rendering with Unity's High Definition Render Pipeline. In ACM SIGGRAPH.Google Scholar
- Johann Heinrich Lambert. 1760. Photometria sive de mensura et gradibus luminis, colorum et umbrae. Klett.Google Scholar
- Xiaoxu Meng, Quan Zheng, Amitabh Varshney, Gurprit Singh, and Matthias Zwicker. 2020. Real-time Monte Carlo Denoising with the Neural Bilateral Grid. In Eurographics Symposium on Rendering - DL-only Track, Carsten Dachsbacher and Matt Pharr (Eds.).Google Scholar
- Ken Museth. 2013. VDB: High-resolution sparse volumes with dynamic topology. ACM transactions on graphics (TOG) 32, 3 (2013), 1--22.Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Ken Museth. 2014. Hierarchical digital differential analyzer for efficient ray-marching in OpenVDB. In ACM SIGGRAPH 2014 Talks. 1--1.Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Ken Museth. 2021. NanoVDB: A GPU-Friendly and Portable VDB Data Structure For Real-Time Rendering And Simulation. (2021). In submission.Google Scholar
- Ken Museth, Jeff Lait, John Johanson, Jeff Budsberg, Ron Henderson, Mihai Alden, Peter Cucka, David Hill, and Andrew Pearce. 2013. OpenVDB: an open-source data structure and toolkit for high-resolution volumes. In Acm siggraph 2013 courses. 1--1.Google Scholar
- Jan Novák Iliyan Georgiev, Johannes Hanika, and Wojciech Jarosz. 2018. Monte Carlo methods for volumetric light transport simulation. In Computer Graphics Forum, Vol. 37. Wiley Online Library, 551--576.Google Scholar
- Jan Novák, Andrew Selle, and Wojciech Jarosz. 2014. Residual ratio tracking for estimating attenuation in participating media. ACM Trans. Graph. 33, 6 (2014), 179--1.Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Ken Perlin and Eric M Hoffert. 1989. Hypertexture. In Proceedings of the 16th Annual Conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques. 253--262.Google Scholar
- Matthias Raab, Daniel Seibert, and Alexander Keller. 2008. Unbiased global illumination with participating media. In Monte Carlo and Quasi-Monte Carlo Methods 2006. Springer, 591--605.Google Scholar
- Alec Radford, Luke Metz, and Soumith Chintala. 2015. Unsupervised representation learning with deep convolutional generative adversarial networks. arXiv preprint arXiv:1511.06434 (2015).Google Scholar
- Olaf Ronneberger, Philipp Fischer, and Thomas Brox. 2015. U-net: Convolutional networks for biomedical image segmentation. In International Conference on Medical image computing and computer-assisted intervention. Springer, 234--241.Google Scholar
Cross Ref
- Florian Simon, Johannes Hanika, Tobias Zirr, and Carsten Dachsbacher. 2017. Line integration for rendering heterogeneous emissive volumes. In Computer Graphics Forum, Vol. 36. Wiley Online Library, 101--110.Google Scholar
- TurboSquid. 2020. 3D Models for Professionals. https://www.turbosquid.com/ Acessed: 2020--12--10.Google Scholar
- Eric Veach and Leonidas J Guibas. 1995. Optimally combining sampling techniques for Monte Carlo rendering. In Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques. 419--428.Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Ryusuke Villemin, Christophe Hery, and Pixar Animation Studios. 2013. Practical illumination from flames. Journal of Computer Graphics Techniques 2, 2 (2013).Google Scholar
- Thijs Vogels, Fabrice Rousselle, Brian McWilliams, Gerhard Röthlin, Alex Harvill, David Adler, Mark Meyer, and Jan Novák. 2018. Denoising with kernel prediction and asymmetric loss functions. ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG) 37, 4 (2018), 1--15.Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Nathan Vos. 2014. Volumetric light effects in killzone: Shadow fall. GPU Pro 5 (2014), 127--147.Google Scholar
- Lance Williams. 1978. Casting curved shadows on curved surfaces. In Proceedings of the 5th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques. 270--274.Google Scholar
Digital Library
- E Woodcock, T Murphy, P Hemmings, and S Longworth. 1965. Techniques used in the GEM code for Monte Carlo neutronics calculations in reactors and other systems of complex geometry. In Proc. Conf. Applications of Computing Methods to Reactor Problems, Vol. 557.Google Scholar
- Bartlomiej Wronski. 2014. Volumetric fog: Unified compute shader based solution to atmospheric scattering. In ACM SIGGRAPH.Google Scholar
- Chris Wyman and Shaun Ramsey. 2008. Interactive volumetric shadows in participating media with single-scattering. In 2008 IEEE Symposium on Interactive Ray Tracing. IEEE, 87--92.Google Scholar
Cross Ref
- Matthias Zwicker, Wojciech Jarosz, Jaakko Lehtinen, Bochang Moon, Ravi Ramamoorthi, Fabrice Rousselle, Pradeep Sen, Cyril Soler, and S-E Yoon. 2015. Recent advances in adaptive sampling and reconstruction for Monte Carlo rendering. In Computer Graphics Forum, Vol. 34. Wiley Online Library, 667--681.Google Scholar
Digital Library
Index Terms
Interactive Path Tracing and Reconstruction of Sparse Volumes
Recommendations
Neural Denoising for Path Tracing of Medical Volumetric Data
In this paper, we transfer machine learning techniques previously applied to denoising surface-only Monte Carlo renderings to path-traced visualizations of medical volumetric data. In the domain of medical imaging, path-traced videos turned out to be an ...
Progressive light volume for interactive volumetric illumination
We propose a technique named progressive light volume to support advanced volumetric illumination effects, such as single scattering and multi scattering. The light volume stores direct lighting information for sample points of the volume data. Using ...
Interactive Display of Isosurfaces with Global Illumination
In many applications, volumetric data sets are examined by displaying isosurfaces, surfaces where the data, or some function of the data, takes on a given value. Interactive applications typically use local lighting models to render such surfaces. This ...






Comments