Parallel MDOM for light transport in participating media

Abstract

We present a novel technique for physically based rendering of participating media like cloud, smoke, wax, marble, etc. We solve the radiative transfer equation (RTE) for participating media using the Modified Discrete Ordinate Method (MDOM), which computes the final solution as a combination of a direct and an indirect component. We propose a scalable GPU based parallel pipeline, for solving the RTE using the MDOM. This parallel RTE solver is capable of rendering intermediate results such as single scattering approximation. We overcome GPU memory size limitations by using low resolution radiance storage while doing high resolution radiance propagation. Furthermore, we achieve scalability by implementing an efficient volumetric data streaming mechanism. Our results demonstrate the ability of our method to render high quality multiple scattering effects.