Shading Normals
Shading Normals enable us to more detailed textures. Take a close look at the sofa, some more detailed patterns are added.
Alpha Masking
Randomly dismissing the intersection, we can make the ray go through the objects such as lace curtains in the picture, seeing the color behind them.
Rough Dielectric
A roughdielectric bsdf in this scene is the glassy cup on the marble table (left most). Here we compare a roughdielectric bunny with a dielectric bunny.
Halton Sampler
We achieved overall noise reduction using Halton sampler. The improment can be quite drastic as can be seen the noise on the wall and the curtains.
Image Denoising
We integrated the Open Image Denoise library from Intel to our renderer. We fed images of normals, albedo and some arbitrary output variables (uv, bvh, distance) to drastically improve the quality of the denoised images.
Bloom Effect
We added bloom effect to the rendered scene to make it more photo-realistic. The bloom effect is applied to the surface that reflect light in the scene, making them appear brighter and more realistic.
Improved Environment Sampling
The light is sampled based on the illumination distribution which drives the sun shine in a consistent direction, reducing a lot of noise. This gives our scene a very simplistic but realistic light source.
Improved Area Lights
We turn the emissive shapes to area lights. Effectively sampling light points on the sphere can reduce massive amount of noise while still retaining the brightness of the scene. We also developed rectangle area light but not used in the scene.
MIS Path Tracer
We want to avoid having to decide between two approaches in naive path tracer (NEE and BSDF sampling). Using MIS, we can somehow weigh them dynamically and reduce the overall variance of our pixel estimator. Here we compare MIS vs naive path tracer.
Homogenous Volume Rendering
The homogenous volume here is the mysterious cat statue. The effect of the homogenous volume is that the part of the statue which is not shined would be invisible. Best view in the high resolution image.
Heterogenous Volume Rendering
The heterogenous volume in this scene is a group of clouds nearby the curtains. Best view in the high resolution image.