Weighted Multipass Methods for Global Illumination
Frank Suykens | Yves Willems |
Contact: Computer Graphics Research Group
Computer Graphics Forum 18, 3 (Proceedings of Eurographics '99), p. C209-C220
Milan, Italy, 7-11 September 1999
Abstract
In multipass rendering, care has to be taken to include all light transport only once in the final solution. Therefore the different methods in current multipass configurations handle a perfectly disjunct part of the light transport. In this paper a Monte Carlo variance reduction technique is presented that probabilistically weights overlapping transport between different methods. A good heuristic for the weights is derived so that strengths of the respective methods are retained. The technique is applied to a combination of radiosity and bidirectional path tracing and significant improvement is obtained over the non-weighted combination. This method promises to be a very useful extension to other multipass algorithms as well.
Keywords: global illumination, Monte Carlo, multipass rendering, bidirectional path tracing, multiple importance sampling