Multidimensional lightcuts

Walter, Bruce; Arbree, Adam; Bala, Kavita; Greenberg, Donald P.

doi:10.1145/1141911.1141997

Cited by 131 publications

(104 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…First is used in some daylighting software tools such as EDSL TAS and DIAL+Suite and it offers some advantages of both approaches. An advanced version of this hybrid method uses Multidimensional Lightcuts [57], based on Lightcuts [58] and Instant Radiosity [29], to handle complex illumination and specular materials efficiently. This method is implemented in Autodesk 360 rendering engine used in Lighting Analysis for Revit, Solar Analysis Tool and Green Building Studio.…”

Section: Hybrid Approachesmentioning

confidence: 99%

State-of-the-art review of solar design tools and methods for assessing daylighting and solar potential for building-integrated photovoltaics

Jakica

2018

Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews

121

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Solar design can take many different forms across disciplines with different methodologies and goals, ranging from acquiring architectural visual effects to assessing illumination for daylighting and solar radiation potential on building surfaces for PV implementation. Furthermore, a capability of solar design methodologies and tools to accurately and time efficiently simulate light phenomena can greatly influence performance results and design decisions. This is especially important in complex cases such as dense urban settings with the significant surface shadowing, and vertical facades including daylighting devices and photovoltaics. Consequently, choosing a suitable approach and tool for each design phase is essential for achieving unique design and performance goals. This paper was carried out within the framework of IEA-PVPS Task 15 -BIPV and it aims to facilitate this decision for all parties involved in solar design process. Here presented, is an overview of almost 200 solar design tools, analyzing their numerous features regarding accuracy, complexity, scale, computation speed, representation as well as building design process integration in about 50 2D/3D, CAD/CAM and BIM software environments. Furthermore, tools from various fields have been analysed in a broad interdisciplinary context of solar design with a particular attention for being used for Daylighting and Building-Integrated Photovoltaics (BIPV) purposes. This approach should open many new perspectives on a potentially wider multidisciplinary usage and interpretation of solar design tools, sometimes well beyond their initial scope of work.

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Section: Hybrid Approachesmentioning

confidence: 99%

State-of-the-art review of solar design tools and methods for assessing daylighting and solar potential for building-integrated photovoltaics

Jakica

2018

Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews

121

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“…Walter et al [2005] proposed the Lightcuts method that uses a hierarchy on lights to reduce the pixel-light computation cost from linear to sublinear. This was extended to multidimensional Lightcuts [Walter et al 2006] for computing high dimensional rendering integrations, such as volume scattering, depth of field or motion blur. The latest work was to apply such a scalable framework to capture light transports in bidirectional ray paths [Walter et al 2012].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In this framework, scenes with diffuse and low-gloss materials can be rendered by approximating direct and indirect illumination from a large number of virtual point lights (VPLs) [Keller 1997]. By viewing the integration of these lights as surface sample-light interactions of the light transport matrix, the rendering is formulated into a matrix sampling problem [Walter et al 2005;Walter et al 2006;Hašan et al 2007], where elements of the matrix are first sampled to obtain representative lights and then these representative lights are integrated to samples (pixels). These two steps require different kinds of data: lights and geometry.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

GPU-based out-of-core many-lights rendering

et al. 2013

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Figure 1: Example scenes rendered using our approach on an NVIDIA GTX 680 GPU with 2GB of memory. The left image is a museum scene, which consists of 117.1 million triangles and 32.4 million lights. The total storage sizes of geometry and lights are 14.3 GB and 3.75 GB respectively. The middle image shows an airport scene with two Boeing 777 models that has total 669.3 million (46.3 GB) triangles and 18 million (2.1 GB) lights. The right image is a carnival scene. There are 17.1 million (1.76 GB) triangles and 256 (29.6 GB) million lights. Our method takes 3m55s, 10m15s and 1m22s to shade the museum, the airport and the carnival scenes respectively, and requires an additional 1m20s, 7m25s and 1m14s to build acceleration structures on these lights and geometry. AbstractIn this paper, we present a GPU-based out-of-core rendering approach under the many-lights rendering framework. Many-lights rendering is an efficient and scalable rendering framework for a large number of lights. But when the data sizes of lights and geometry are both beyond the in-core memory storage size, the data management of these two out-of-core data becomes critical. In our approach, we formulate such a data management as a graph traversal optimization problem that first builds out-of-core lights and geometry data into a graph, and then guides shading computations by finding a shortest path to visit all vertices in the graph. Based on the proposed data management, we develop a GPU-based out-of-GPU-core rendering algorithm that manages data between the CPU host memory and the GPU device memory. Two main steps are taken in the algorithm: the out-of-core data preparation to pack data into optimal data layouts for the many-lights rendering, and the outof-core shading using graph-based data management. We demonstrate our algorithm on scenes with out-of-core detailed geometry and out-of-core lights. Results show that our approach generates complex global illumination effects with increased data access coherence and has one order of magnitude performance gain over the CPU-based approach.

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“…Once our FE solution is computed, the computation of each sample reduces to a single evaluation of the render query function. The surface and single scattering components of our images are computed using a combination of Multidimensional Lightcuts (MDLC) [45] and an analytical single scattering approximation [20]. Our FE implementation is split between Java, which provides an implementation of MDLC, and C++, which provides an interface to the LibMesh [28] library.…”

Section: Details Of the Rendering Computationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Heterogeneous Subsurface Scattering Using the Finite Element Method

Arbree

Walter

Bala

2011

IEEE Trans. Visual. Comput. Graphics

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Abstract-Materials with visually important heterogeneous subsurface scattering, including marble, skin, leaves, and minerals, are common in the real world. However, general, accurate and efficient rendering of these materials is an open problem. In this paper, we describe a finite element (FE) solution of the heterogeneous diffusion equation (DE) that solves this problem. Our algorithm is the first to use the FE method to solve the difficult problem of heterogeneous subsurface rendering. To create our algorithm, we make two contributions. First, we correct previous work and derive an accurate and complete heterogeneous diffusion formulation. This formulation has two key elements: an accurate model of the reduced intensity (RI) source, the diffusive source boundary condition (DSBC), and its associated render query function. Second, we solve this formulation accurately and efficiently using the FE method. Using there results, we can render subsurface scattering with a simple four step algorithm. To demonstrate that our algorithm is simultaneously general, accurate and efficient, we test its performance on a series of difficult scenes. For a wide range of materials and geometry, it produces, in minutes, images that nearly match path traced references, that required hours.

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Multidimensional lightcuts

Cited by 131 publications

References 27 publications

State-of-the-art review of solar design tools and methods for assessing daylighting and solar potential for building-integrated photovoltaics

State-of-the-art review of solar design tools and methods for assessing daylighting and solar potential for building-integrated photovoltaics

GPU-based out-of-core many-lights rendering

Heterogeneous Subsurface Scattering Using the Finite Element Method

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