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Enhanced Direct Lighting Using Visibility-Aware Light Sampling

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Advances in Computer Graphics (CGI 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 14496))

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Abstract

Next event estimation has been widely applied to Monte Carlo rendering methods such as path tracing since estimating direct and indirect lighting separately often enables finding light paths from the eye to the lights effectively. Its success heavily relies on light sampling for direct lighting when a scene contains multiple light sources since each light can contribute differently to the reflected radiance on a surface point. We present a light sampling technique that can guide such a light selection to improve direct lighting. We estimate a spatially-varying function that approximates the contribution of each light on surface points within a discretized local area (i.e., a voxel in an adaptive octree) while considering the visibility between lights and surface points. We then construct a probability distribution function for sampling lights per voxel, which is proportional to our estimated function. We demonstrate that our light sampling technique can significantly improve rendering quality thanks to improved direct lighting with our light sampling.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the anonymous reviewers for feedback on our paper and the following authors and artists for the 3D models or scenes: Asian Dragon (the Stanford Computer Graphics Laboratory), Lamp (UP3D), Whiteroom (Jay-Artist), and Veach-Ajar (Benedikt Bitterli). The Hotel scene was bought from TurboSquid. This work was supported in part by Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and Korea Creative Content Agency (No. R2021080001) and by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIT) (No. RS-2023-00207939).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology, Gwangju, 61005, South Korea

    Geonu Noh, Hajin Choi & Bochang Moon

Authors
  1. Geonu Noh
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  2. Hajin Choi
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  3. Bochang Moon
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Bochang Moon .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China

    Bin Sheng

  2. Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China

    Lei Bi

  3. University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Jinman Kim

  4. MIRALab-CUI, University of Geneve, Carouge, Geneve, Switzerland

    Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann

  5. Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne, Switzerland

    Daniel Thalmann

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© 2024 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG

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Noh, G., Choi, H., Moon, B. (2024). Enhanced Direct Lighting Using Visibility-Aware Light Sampling. In: Sheng, B., Bi, L., Kim, J., Magnenat-Thalmann, N., Thalmann, D. (eds) Advances in Computer Graphics. CGI 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14496. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-50072-5_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-50072-5_15

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-50071-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-50072-5

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