ompf2.com

If you already have the VNDF sampling from the 2014 paper then implementing the new is trivial. It's the same set of samples with the same PDF, so you just have to copy paste the reference sample method and then you'll have faster GGX sampling

Messed up a transform while cleaning up my implementation of A Spherical Cap Preserving Parameterization for Spherical Distributions. I call it the Blackhole Sun effect.

Looks like a made up term that he doesn't bother to define.

Alright. That's basically what I want to do at some point for my own path tracer as well in interactive scenarios. I don't think I've ever read anything about it, since it should be fairly trivial, but http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.155.326&rep=rep1&type=pdf and https://gra...

Yea, that really doesn't explain it. Now it sounds a bit more like (path) filtering, but a bounce count in the range of thousands (at least per individual path) is generally a bit silly.
If it's filtering, then there' been a ton of work done in that field.

What exactly do you mean by progressive depth? Render one bounce at a time and defer the next bounces (if any) to the next render call / frame? If so then I haven't seen anything directly related to that, but there are papers that sort the rays pr bounce, so visualizing them as well is fairly trivia...

Interesting. I guess I must do it slightly different then, because I just tested mine with MIS and MIS + 3 light RIS (or whatever warped self-rolled version of RIS I'm using) and there is no difference. I don't scale the PDF though when evaluating multiple light sources. I simply leave the light PDF...

Out of curiosity, because it sounds like I'm doing something very similar and back when I was investigating it I saw no bias issues, what is the RIS trap? Is RIS conceptually flawed or is it a reoccurring 'gotcha' that you keep forgetting?

Well if it's lossy then it's irrelevant. The edgebreaker compression is lossless though. It simply compresses the topology / connectivity and I seriously doubt anyone would consider lossy topology compression. High-res-CAD-model-in, swizz-cheese-model-out would be a no go.

The forum isn't dead, just really quiet. Like a lion on the hunt. :) Personally I can say that Draco's in my backlog and will stay there for the foreseeable future, since it doesn't really help my shoot those precious precious rays. :) I doubt that the compression would work for on GPU memory, but i...