LuxCoreRender Forums

B.Y.O.B. wrote: ↑Fri Sep 20, 2019 8:08 pm Since LuxCore has a triangle primitive, but no sphere primitive, I would recommend to make the walls out of two triangles each.

provisory wrote: ↑Fri Sep 20, 2019 7:47 pm Oh, I see, Dade has written OpenCL implementations from smallpt!

Vutshi wrote: ↑Fri Sep 20, 2019 8:03 pm It would be interesting to compare Luxcore with the PSR enhanced smallpt.

Dade wrote: ↑Fri Sep 20, 2019 9:24 pm LuxCore has Hybrid (i.e. eye + light tracing) rendering for normal caustics, it is probably 100 times faster than SmallPT+PSR.

Vutshi wrote: ↑Fri Sep 20, 2019 9:31 pm

Dade wrote: ↑Fri Sep 20, 2019 9:24 pm LuxCore has Hybrid (i.e. eye + light tracing) rendering for normal caustics, it is probably 100 times faster than SmallPT+PSR.

What is a normal caustic?

Maybe my question is whether directional blur has some good properties for the combination with MCMC which spatial blur does not have.

Yes, that is a very good question. In the end there is no conceptual (mathematical) difference between spatial and angular blur. Formulating the regularization as an angular blur is just much more convenient in terms of the integration process: you can easily show that both MC and (a bit more difficult) MCMC converges with such sort of regularization. Moreover you can control where and why to regularize - based on the actual underlying local BSDF.
On the other hand, as it was rightly noticed, the proposed method doesn't use any cache. However the cache seems to be not required for MCMC integration, because each Markov chain always has a cache entry, which is its current state. Thus having a lot of chains is equivalent to having a sparse yet importance-sampled distribution of paths.

As for low probability of sampling regularized paths, this is less of an issue with proper mutation strategies - once it's found, e.g. manifold exploration can easily sample all nearby paths. So, yes, that obviously causes problems when used together with MC methods, like PT and BDPT. However this probability is as low as in PPM, the only reason why we don't see this issue in PPM is due to a large cache, which highly alleviates it.

Another interesting question is the regularization of hardly-sampleable paths, e.g. for some fast preview rendering. But that first of all depends on the ultimate goal of the renderer itself and secondly the bias should be assessed, probably similarly to APPM or something like that. So, that's what's definitely not done yet.

So what's the conclusion? is this method better than BDPT? VCM? SPPM?

The conclusion is that now MLT can also sample some complex light paths, like reflected caustics from point light, prior non-sampleable by unbiased methods. The price for that of course is the bias, which occurs on such light paths (and only on them). This bias appears similarly to PPM. MLT was demonstrated on a highly occluded scene, where all ordinary Monte Carlo methods produce noisier image.

But are you sure that we cannot use MLT with Vertex Merging and that it will produce similar results... but unbiased with the constraint that it is more expensive ?

Vertex Connection and Merging never produced unbiased results AFAIK. And the "merging" in the PSR paper is mathematically very similar to the one proposed in VCM, i.e. also some perturbation of the direction. However with this formulation the "merging" can also be used with MCMC methods. The only difference is that VCM uses cache (photon map), however I employ MLT instead. MLT also has some inherent caching via current state of the Markov chain.

Dade wrote: ↑Fri Sep 20, 2019 9:24 pm

Vutshi wrote: ↑Fri Sep 20, 2019 8:03 pm It would be interesting to compare Luxcore with the PSR enhanced smallpt.

LuxCore has Hybrid (i.e. eye + light tracing) rendering for normal caustics, it is probably 100 times faster than SmallPT+PSR.

Vutshi wrote: ↑Mon Sep 23, 2019 7:35 am SmallPT+PSR has no problem rendering.
This is at 65k spp.

Vutshi wrote: ↑Mon Sep 23, 2019 7:35 am P.S. Is there any fundamental difference between the reflected caustics and the underwater caustics? It seems I can not see them if I add a thin layer of water on the bottom of the scene.

Dade wrote: ↑Mon Sep 23, 2019 8:20 am Water can transmit or reflect while mirror can only reflect so it is likely to require 2x the amount of samples to obtain the same level of noise.