A layered depth map is an extension of the well-known depth map used in rasterization. Multiple layered depth maps can be used as a coarse scene representation. We develop two global illumination methods which use said ...

Reducing the amount of conditional branching instructions in innermost loops is crucial for high performance code on contemporary hardware architectures. In the context of ray tracing algorithms, typical examples for ...

Acceleration data structures such as kd-trees aim at reducing the per-ray cost which is crucial for rendering performance. The de-facto standard for constructing kd-trees, the Surface Area Heuristic (SAH), does not take ...

In physically-based image synthesis, the path space of light transport paths is usually explored by stochastic sampling. The two main families of algorithms are Monte Carlo/quasi-Monte Carlo sampling and Markov chain Monte ...

Optimal BVH layout differs among ray types. To accelerate shadow rays, the use of a specialized traversal order, optionally with an additional data structure has been proposed. In this paper we show how sorting child nodes ...

Path-traced global illumination (GI) becomes increasingly important in movie production. With offscreen elements considerably contributing to the path traced image, geometric complexity increases drastically, requiring ...

In this work, we present a novel information visualization tool to gain insight into the light transport in a physically-based rendering setting. The tool consists of a sampling-based data reduction technique, an extended ...

Ray tracing is a widely used algorithm to compute images with high visual quality. Mapping ray tracing computations to massively parallel hardware architectures in an efficient manner is a difficult task. Based on an ...

We present a k-d tree construction algorithm designed to accelerate rendering of scenes with motion blur, in application scenarios where a k-d tree is either required or desired. Our associated data structure focuses on ...

Rendering realistic images requires exploring the vast space of all possible paths that light can take between emitters and receivers. Thanks to the advances in rendering we can tackle this problem using different algorithms; ...