Rendered with a point light using 128 samples
Rendered with an area light using 128 samples
Implementing area lights was quite straightforward and didn't create all too many problems; the biggest one definitely was the pdf though, as it took me way too long to figure out that we actually need them! The pdfs were still set to 0 for all surfaces when running tests.
Rendered with an area light using 32 samples
Denoised using an additional 64 samples for normals and albedo each
Denoising however almost broke me. After including the recommended denoiser by Intel,
my renderer just did not want to work anymore. No scene was rendered, no error was raised and
even invalid .xml's didn't crash. Even after 10 to 20 hours of trying to figure stuff out and
having multiple people review the code, no error was found. It turned out that - although the relevant
directory was included in the path variables - the directory still wasn't found. Some time later, denoising
suddenly worked, although I didn't change anything. A restart of the device was probably all that was required.
Have you tried restarting your PC?
And finally: Volumetric Rendering.
This feature took me several entire days of coding, reworking the way I implement volumes and thinking through
the logic. And even after all of this, up until the submission of the final scene,
this feature has been broken. I do not understand what goes wrong. Given a blue volume (in the shape of a cube) with
a green-ish shadow, I have created all other colors for both the volume and the shadow but the correct one doesn't want
to appear.
My implementation
Blender
