Coherent and importance sampled LVC BDPT on the GPU

Abstract

Bidirectional path tracing (BDPT) can render highly realistic scenes with complicated lighting scenarios. The Light Vertex Cache (LVC) based BDPT method by Davidovic et al. [Davidovič et al. 2014] provided good performance on scenes with simple materials in a progressive rendering scenario. In this paper, we propose a new bidirectional path tracing formulation based on the LVC approach that handles scenes with complex, layered materials efficiently on the GPU. We achieve coherent material evaluation while conserving GPU memory requirements using sorting. We propose a modified method for selecting light vertices using the contribution importance which improves the image quality for a given amount of work. Progressive rendering can empower artists in the production pipeline to iterate and preview their work quickly. We hope the work presented here will enable the use of GPUs in the production pipeline with complex materials and complicated lighting scenarios.