My first Supersize-Image

[dawelter]

Hi!

This is indeed very impressive, XMAMan!

Say, have you tried to render the atmosphere/cloud scene with UPBP? I have to wonder though how well the algorithm copes with "nature" scenes.

Btw, @ ultimatemau, thanks for the tip regarding "Path Guiding in Production". I found it's really a great overview and there are some tips in it which are not in the original papers

[XMAMan]

@Dawelter: I have tryed UPBP on the Sky/Cloud-Scene. It works yes but in this scene I use a Directional-Lightsource for the Sun. If I create a volumetric Photonmap for the Beam2Beam, Point2Point and Beam2Point-Querrys, than only few Photons are stored in the View-Frustum. This is, because the View-Frustum is very small in compare with the hole Atmosphere from the Earth. If I would use Spot-Light, which spots the View-Frustum or a Directional-Light with Importance-Sampling, than it would perform better. But at the moment, I have not implemented Importance-Sampling für the SubLight-Path-Creation-Step for Directional-Lights. If I have implemented this feature, than I can test UPBP again. At the moment, it works as goog as I don't would use a Photonmap.

[dawelter]

Yes. You are right. Big scene plus directional light is a problem.

Would you spend more time on scenes in general? I believe you have many cool algorithms, but little material to exploit them

[XMAMan]

At the moment I'm working on Hair- and SSS-Bsdfs.

I have improved my parallax-mapping and now the pillar on the left looks better:

[XMAMan]

Here the next little improvement. I got the tip from papaboo in this post:

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

I have replaced the Sampling-routine from the visible normal from slopespace-sampling to projected area-sampling and now the brdf-sampling is twice as fast.

[XMAMan]

I have now implemented Hdr-Environmentlighting. Here is a scene with blue sky