Bidirectional Path Tracer

This plugin implements a bidirectional path tracer (short: BDPT) with support formultiple importance sampling, as proposed by Veach and Guibas [45].
A bidirectional path tracer computes radiance estimates by starting two separate random walks from an emitter and a sensor. The resulting subpaths are connected at every possible interaction vertex, creating a large number of complete paths of different lengths. These paths are then used to estimate the amount of radiance that is transferred from the emitter to a pixel on the sensor.
Generally, some of the created paths will be undesirable, since they lead to high-variance radiance estimates. To alleviate this situation, BDPTmakes use ofmultiple importance sampling which, roughly speaking, weights paths based on their predicted utility.
The bidirectional path tracer in Mitsuba is a complete implementation of the technique that handles all sampling strategies, including those that involve direct interactions with the sensor. For this purpose, finite-aperture sensors are explicitly represented by surfaces in the scene so that they can be intersected by random walks started at emitters.
Bidirectional path tracing is a relatively “heavy” rendering technique—for the same number of samples per pixel, it is easily 3-4 times slower than regular path tracing. However, it usually makes up for this by producing considerably lower-variance radiance estimates (i.e. the output images have less noise).
The code parallelizes over multiple cores and machines, but with one caveat: some of the BDPT path sampling strategies are incompatble with the usual approach of rendering an image tile by tile, since they can potentially contribute to any pixel on the screen. This means that each rendering work unit must be associated with a full-sized image! When network render nodes are involved or the resolution of this light image is very high, a bottleneck can arise where more work is spent accumulating or transmitting these images than actual rendering.
There are two possible resorts should this situation arise: the first one is to reduce the number of work units so that there is approximately one unit per core (and hence one image to transmit per core).
This can be done by increasing the block size in the GUI preferences or passing the -b parameter to the mitsuba executable. The second option is to simply disable these sampling strategies at the cost of reducing the effectiveness of bidirectional path tracing (particularly, when rendering caustics). For this, set lightImage to false.When rendering an image of a reasonable resolutionwithout network nodes, this is not a big concern, hence these strategies are enabled by default.

Remarks:
• This integrator does not work with dipole-style subsurface scattering models.
• This integrator does not yet work with certain non-reciprocal BSDFs (i.e. bumpmap, but this will be addressed in the future

Parameter

  • Max. path depth : integer
    • Specifies the longest path depth in the generated output image (where -1 corresponds to ∞). A value of 1 will only render directly visible light sources. 2 will lead to singlebounce (direct-only) illumination, and so on. (Default: -1 -> 24 @ blender)

  • Russian roulette starting depth : integer
    • Specifies the minimum path depth, after which the implementation will start to use the “russian roulette” path termination criterion. (Default: 5 -> 10 @ blender)

  • Create light image : boolean
    • Include sampling strategies that connect paths traced from emitters directly to the camera? (i.e. what ptracer does)
    • This improves the effectiveness of bidirectional path tracing but severely increases the local and remote communication overhead, since large light images must be transferred between threads or over the network. See the text below for a more detailed explanation. (Default: include these strategies, i.e. true)

  • Use direct sampling methods : boolean
    • Enable direct sampling strategies? This is a generalization of direct illumination sampling that works with both emitters and sensors. Usually a good idea. (Default: use direct sampling, i.e. true)


  • 最終更新:2014-05-20 15:29:32

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