Practical Path Guiding for Cycles
This paper has been recently implemented into Walt Disney Animation Studio's Hyperion Renderer, and Pixar's Renderman Renderer. It was first used in production on Frozen 2.
This method allows much more efficient rendering of difficult light paths (such as caustics and indirect lighting) whilst maintaining an unbiased approach.
This would be perfect for cycles to speed up paths that the engine struggles with, without the need to add complex features such as a bidirectional or VCM/UPBP.
Paper link: tom94.net/data/publications/mueller17practical/mueller17practical.pdf
Authors' Implementation: github.com/Tom94/practical-path-guiding
Demonstration video: youtube.com/watch
6 Comments
youtube.com/watch
Starting from 36:35
* @leul.mulugeta * Yep! Incredible timing! :-)
I need this!!!
Also there is this from NVidia that seems promising youtube.com/watch
As always: paper's demos are intriguing (they have to). But would this be possible to be added seamlessly into Cycles? Does it has rough edges? Would it support every Cycles feature? Devs are quite conservative when it comes to evaluating algorythms methods and papers and they are probably right: who wants too quickly adopted solutions that become outdated and surpassed in a few years? I can already foresee the long awaited denoising feature being abandoned because of Oidn.
That said, I'd love to have this feature as long as it can be implemented painlessly. Maybe with the increased coding man-power that BF has now, the conservativeness can be lowered, who knows?
* @ Lsscpp * If it's a game changer someone will make a branch and call it the "Caustics Build" of blender just for this one feature.
* @ Lsscpp * For what I can see it should be possible to use it with the not bidirectional features of Cycles (aka the ray paths node) with just minor tweaks, then it should be an almost drop function to join the BSDF sampling in the scene