CS888 Advanced Topics in Computer Graphics — Rendering — Winter 2024



Course Overview

Rendering is widely used for synthesizing realistic images that we all see in movies, TV commercials, and industrial design. This seminar-style course will consist primarily of paper presentations and discussions. We will primarily focus on offline rendering techniques for physics-based light transport simulation. Students will encounter and use a variety of numerical, computational, and mathematical techniques and tools, such as numerical integration, efficient spatial queries, integral equations, stochastic models, signal processing, optics, parallel computation, efficient memory accesses, and so on. The course takes the style of a seminar: students will take turns presenting papers, followed by a group discussion of the relative merits and limitations of the paper in question. Students are also expected to read each paper and engage in discussion.

Course Goals:

  • Develop familiarity with a range of techniques and tools in rendering to catch up with the latest work in this field.
  • Build experience reading and evaluating technical papers, and giving presentations.
  • Have fun and identify topics in rendering that you truly enjoy studying further.

Administrative Details

Time and location: TTh 12:00 - 13:20, DC 2568
Instructor: Shlomi Steinberg
E-mail: steinberg AT uwaterloo
Office hours: By appointment

Grade Breakdown:

  • Student presentations: 75%
  • Participation in discussions: 25%

Paper Presentations and Discussions

You will give a few technical presentations (depending on the number of enrolled students), clearly describing the proposed technique and the novel contributions of the paper, and discussing the paper’s strengths and weaknesses. The presenter should carry out sufficient background reading to understand the method in reasonable detail, answer questions, and be able to lead the group discussion afterward. The lectures at the beginning will cover some tips and ideas on how to discuss and present technical ideas. Even for papers that you are not assigned for presentation, you are still expected to read the paper and to participate in a discussion about it after the presentation. Please be prepared to be able to give a presentation.

Prerequisites

Enthusiasm for computer graphics and rendering is a must. Linear algebra, calculus, and statistics will be required depending on the paper we read. Experience with both numerical computing (e.g. CS370/371, CS475) and computer graphics (e.g., CS488) are recommended. Familiarity with some numerical techniques will be useful, though you are likely to learn new techniques as you read papers.

Schedule
9 January Intro
11 January Intro
16 January Intro
18 January Intro
23 January no class
25 January Hongfei – “Path Cuts: Efficient Rendering of Pure Specular Light Transport”, Wang et al.
30 January Matthew – “Optimally combining sampling techniques for Monte Carlo rendering”, Veach and Guibas
1 February Scott – “Spectrally optimal sampling for distribution ray tracing”, Mitchell
6 February Zane – “Light scattering from human hair fibers”, Marschner et al.
8 February Xiaoyu - “Heuristics for ray tracing using space subdivision”, MacDonald and Booth
13 February     Julia - “Metropolis light transport”, Veach and Guibas
15 February Hongfei – “Neural Complex Luminaires: Representation and Rendering”, Zhu et al.
20 February reading week
22 February reading week
27 February Matthew – “Spatiotemporal reservoir resampling for real-time ray tracing with dynamic direct lighting”, Bitterli et al.
29 February Scott – “Rendering glints on high-resolution normal-mapped specular surfaces”, Yan et al.
5 March Zane – “Precomputed Atmospheric Scattering.” Bruneton and Neyret
7 March Julia – “A simple and robust mutation strategy for the metropolis light transport algorithm”, Kelemen et al.
12 March Xiaoyu – “On Fast Construction of SAH-based Bounding Volume Hierarchies”, Wald
14 March Hongfei – “Towards Attention-aware Foveated Rendering”, Krajancich et al.
19 March Matthew – “A Practical Extension to Microfacet Theory for the Modeling of Varying Iridescence”, Belcour et al.
21 March no class
26 March Scott – “A Two-scale Microfacet Reflectance Model Combining Reflection and Diffraction”, Holzschuch et al.
28 March Zane – “Embree: a kernel framework for efficient CPU ray tracing”, Wald et al.
2 April Xiaoyu – “OptiX: a general purpose ray tracing engine”, Parker et al.
4 April Julia – “Nerf: Representing scenes as neural radiance fields for view synthesis”, Mildenhall et al.

Papers List

Students may chose papers outside this list, please contact me for approval if you elect to do so.

  • Acceleration data structures
    • “Heuristics for ray tracing using space subdivision.”, MacDonald and Booth, The Visual Computer, 1990.
    • “On fast construction of SAH-based bounding volume hierarchies.”, Wald, IEEE Symposium on Interactive Ray Tracing, 2007.
    • “Fast agglomerative clustering for rendering.”, Walter, Bala, Kulkarni,and Pingal, IEEE Symposium on Interactive Ray Tracing, 2008.
    • “Spatial splits in bounding volume hierarchies”, Stich, Friedrich, and Dietrich, Proceedings of the Conference on High Performance Graphics, 2009.
    • “HLBVH: hierarchical LBVH construction for real-time ray tracing of dynamic geometry”, Pantaleoni and Luebke, Proceedings of High Performance Graphics, 2010.
    • “Tessellation-Free Displacement Mapping for Ray Tracing”, Thonat, Beaune, Sun, Carr, and Boubekeur, SIGGRAPH Asia 2021.
  • Sampling
    • “Spectrally optimal sampling for distribution ray tracing”, Mitchell, Proceedings of Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, 1991.
    • “A comparison of methods for generating Poisson disk distributions”, Lagae and Dutré, Computer Graphics Forum, 2008.
    • “Quasi-Monte Carlo image synthesis in a nutshell”, Keller, Monte Carlo and Quasi-Monte Carlo Methods, 2013.
    • “Progressive multi-jittered sample sequences”, Christensen, Kensler, Kilpatrick, Computer Graphics Forum, 2018.
    • “Neural importance sampling”, Müller, McWilliams, Rousselle, Gross, and Novák, ACM Transactions on Graphics, 2019.
    • “Sliced Optimal Transport Sampling”, Paulin, Bonneel, Coeurjolly, Iehl, Webanck, Desbrun, and Ostromoukhov, SIGGRAPH 2020.
  • Materials
    • “A Practical Extension to Microfacet Theory for the Modeling of Varying Iridescence”, Belcour, Laurent and Barla, Pascal, ACM Transactions on Graphics, 2017.
    • “A Two-scale Microfacet Reflectance Model Combining Reflection and Diffraction”, Holzschuch, Nicolas and Pacanowski, Romain, ACM Transactions on Graphics, 2017.
    • “Scratch Iridescence: Wave-Optical Rendering of Diffractive Surface Structure”, Sebastian Werner and Zdravko Velinov and Wenzel Jakob and Matthias Hullin, ACM Transactions on Graphics, 2017.
    • “A General Framework for Pearlescent Materials”, Ibón Guillén, Julio Marco, Diego Gutierrez, Wenzel Jakob, and Adrian Jarabo, ACM Transactions on Graphics, 2020.
    • “Generalization of Lambert’s reflectance model”, Oren and Nayar, Proceedings of the 21st annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, 1994.
    • “Light scattering from human hair fibers”, Marschner, Jensen, Cammarano, Worley, and Hanrahan, ACM Transactions on Graphics, 2003.
    • “Understanding the masking-shadowing function in microfacet-based BRDFs”, Heitz, JCGT, 2014.
    • “Rendering glints on high-resolution normal-mapped specular surfaces”, Yan, Hašan, Jakob, Lawrence, Marschner, and Ramamoorthi, ACM Transactions on Graphics, 2014.
    • “Efficient Rendering of Layered Materials using an Atomic Decomposition with Statistical Operators”, Belcour, ACM Transactions on Graphics, 2018.
    • “Position-Free Monte Carlo Simulation for Arbitrary Layered BSDFs”, Guo, Hašan, and Zhao, SIGGRAPH Asia 2018.
    • “A Full-Wave Reference Simulator for Computing Surface Reflectance”, Yu, Yunchen and Xia, Mengqi and Walter, Bruce and Michielssen, Eric and Marschner, Steve, ACM Transactions on Graphics, 2023.
  • Theories
    • “Robust Monte Carlo methods for light transport simulation” (Chapter 8), Veach PhD thesis: Stanford University, 1997.
    • “Adjoints and importance in rendering: An overview”, Christensen, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 2003.
    • “A frequency analysis of light transport”, Durand, Holzschuch, Soler Chan, and Sillion, ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG), 2005.
    • “A constructive theory of sampling for image synthesis using reproducing kernel bases”, Lessig, Desbrun, and Fiume, ACM Transactions on Graphics, 2014.
    • “A radiative transfer framework for non-exponential media”, Bitterli, Ravichandran, Müller, Wrenninge, Novák, Marschner, and Jarosz, ACM Transactions on Graphics, 2018.
    • “A Theoretical Analysis of Compactness of the Light Transport Operator” Soler, Molazem, and Subr, ACM Transactions on Graphics, 2022.
  • Monte Carlo integration
    • “Optimally combining sampling techniques for Monte Carlo rendering”, Veach and Guibas, Proceedings of Computer graphics and Interactive Techniques, 1995.
    • “Light transport simulation with vertex connection and merging”, Georgiev, Krivánek, Davidovic, and Slusallek, ACM Transaction on Graphics, 2012.
    • “Adjoint-driven Russian roulette and splitting in light transport simulation”, Vorba and Křivánek, ACM Transactions on Graphics, 2016.
    • “Practical path guiding for efficient light transport simulation”, Müller, Gross, and Novák, Computer Graphics Forum, 2017.
    • “Optimal multiple importance sampling”, Kondapaneni, Vévoda, Grittmann, Skřivan, Slusallek, and Křivánek, ACM Transactions on Graphics, 2019.
    • “Spatiotemporal reservoir resampling for real-time ray tracing with dynamic direct lighting”, Bitterli, Wyman, Pharr, Shirley, Lefohn, and Jarosz, ACM Transactions on Graphics, 2020.
  • Density estimation
    • “Global illumination using photon maps”, Jensen, Eurographics workshop on Rendering techniques, 1996.
    • “Progressive photon mapping”, Hachisuka, Ogaki, and Jensen, ACM Transactions on Graphics, 2008.
    • “A comprehensive theory of volumetric radiance estimation using photon points and beams”, Jarosz, Nowrouzezahrai, Sadeghi, and Jensen, ACM ansactions on Graphics, 2011.
    • “A path space extension for robust light transport simulation”, Hachisuka, Pantaleoni, and Jensen, ACM Transactions on Graphics, 2012.
    • “Unifying points, beams, and paths in volumetric light transport simulation”, Křivánek, Georgiev, Hachisuka, Vévoda, Šik, Nowrouzezahrai, and Jarosz, ACM Transactions on Graphics, 2014.
    • “Beyond points and beams: higher-dimensional photon samples for volumetric light transport” Bitterli and Jarosz, ACM Transactions on Graphics, 2017.
  • Markov chain Monte Carlo
    • “Metropolis light transport”, Veach and Guibas, Proceedings of Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, 1997.
    • “A simple and robust mutation strategy for the metropolis light transport algorithm”, Kelemen, Szirmay-Kalos, Antal, and Csonka, Computer Graphics Forum, 2002.
    • “Manifold exploration: a Markov Chain Monte Carlo technique for rendering scenes with difficult specular transport”, Jakob and Marschner, ACM Transactions on Graphics, 2012.
    • “Specular manifold sampling for rendering high-frequency caustics”, Zeltner, Tizian and Georgiev, Iliyan and Jakob, Wenzel, ACM Transactions on Graphics, 2020.
    • “Multiplexed metropolis light transport”, Hachisuka, Kaplanyan, and Dachsbacher, ACM Transactions on Graphics, 2014.
    • “The natural-constraint representation of the path space for efficient light transport simulation”, Kaplanyan, Hanika, and Dachsbacher, ACM Transactions on Graphics, 2014.
    • “Langevin Monte Carlo rendering with gradient-based adaptation”, Luan, Zhao, Bala, and Gkioulekas, ACM Transactions on Graphics, 2020.
  • Derivatives and differences
    • “Path differentials and applications”, Suykens and Willems, Eurographics Workshop on Rendering Techniques, 2001.
    • “Gradient-domain metropolis light transport”, Lehtinen, Karras, Laine, Aittala, Durand, and Aila, ACM Transactions on Graphics, 2013.
    • “Differentiable Monte Carlo ray tracing through edge sampling”, Li, Aittala, Durand, and Lehtinen, ACM Transactions on Graphics, 2018.
    • “Path-space differentiable rendering”, Zhang, Miller, Yan, Gkioulekas, and Zhao, ACM Transactions on Graphics, 2020.
    • “Radiative backpropagation: an adjoint method for lightning-fast differentiable rendering”, Nimier-David, Speierer, Ruiz, and Jakob, ACM Transactions on Graphics, 2020.
    • “Monte Carlo estimators for differential light transport”, Zeltner, Speierer, Georgiev, and Jakob, ACM Transactions on Graphics, 2021.
  • Rendering systems
    • “OptiX: a general purpose ray tracing engine”, Parker et al., ACM Transactions on Graphics, 2010.
    • “Embree: a kernel framework for efficient CPU ray tracing”, Wald et al., ACM Transactions on Graphics, 2014.
    • “Manuka: A batch-shading architecture for spectral path tracing in movie production”, Fascione et al., ACM Transactions on Graphics, 2018.
    • “The Design and Evolution of Disney’s Hyperion Renderer” Burley et al., ACM Transactions on Graphics, 2018
    • “Arnold: A brute-force production path tracer”, Georgiev et al., ACM Transactions on Graphics, 2018.
    • “Mitsuba 2: A retargetable forward and inverse renderer”, Nimier-David et al., ACM Transactions on Graphics, 2019.
  • Other
    • “Acquiring Spatially Varying Appearance of Printed Holographic Surfaces”, Toisoul, Antoine and Dhillon, Daljit Singh and Ghosh, Abhijeet, ACM Transactions on Graphics, 2018.
    • “Fabricating BRDFs at high spatial resolution using wave optics”, Levin, Anat and Glasner, Daniel and Xiong, Ying and Durand, Frédo and Freeman, William and Matusik, Wojciech and Zickler, Todd, ACM Transactions on Graphics, 2013.
    • “A Monte Carlo framework for rendering speckle statistics in scattering media”, Bar, Chen and Alterman, Marina and Gkioulekas, Ioannis and Levin, Anat, ACM Transactions on Graphics, 2019.
    • “Micron-scale light transport decomposition using interferometry”, Gkioulekas, Ioannis and Levin, Anat and Durand, Frédo and Zickler, Todd, ACM Transactions on Graphics, 2015.
    • “Chemomechanical simulation of soap film flow on spherical bubbles”, Huang, Weizhen and Iseringhausen, Julian and Kneiphof, Tom and Qu, Ziyin and Jiang, Chenfanfu and Hullin, Matthias B., ACM Transactions on Graphics, 2020.
    • “Computational design of nanostructural color for additive manufacturing”, Auzinger, Thomas and Heidrich, Wolfgang and Bickel, Bernd, ACM Transactions on Graphics, 2018.