ompf2.com

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 htt...

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...

What do you mean by 'in a renderer'? As datamodel pre-/postprocessing? Or actually uploading the compressed data and decompress on the fly? (if such a thing is possible)