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1. Dynamic Reflections Using Eye-Resolution Point Rendering

   Gavane, A; Watson, B.A. (July 2021, Highperformance graphics)

   We describe an improvement to the recently developed view independent rendering (VIR), and apply it to dynamic cube-mapped reflections. Standard multiview rendering (MVR) renders a scene six times for each cube map. VIR traverses the geometry once per frame to generate a point cloud optimized to many cube maps, using it to render reflected views in parallel. Our improvement, eye-resolution point rendering (EPR), is faster than VIR and makes cube maps faster than MVR, with comparable visual quality. We are currently improving EPR’s run time by reducing point cloud size and per-point processing. 

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2. Light Field Display Point Rendering

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3651300  

   Gavane, Ajinkya; Watson, Benjamin (May 2024, Proceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques)

   Rendering for light field displays (LFDs) requires rendering of dozens or hundreds of views, which must then be combined into a single image on the display, making real-time LFD rendering extremely difficult. We introduce light field display point rendering (LFDPR), which meets these challenges by improving eye-based point rendering [Gavane and Watson 2023] with texture-based splatting, which avoids oversampling of triangles mapped to only a few texels; and with LFD-biased sampling, which adjusts horizontal and vertical triangle sampling to match the sampling of the LFD itself. To improve image quality, we introduce multiview mipmapping, which reduces texture aliasing even though compute shaders do not support hardware mipmapping. We also introduce angular supersampling and reconstruction to combat LFD view aliasing and crosstalk. The resulting LFDPR is 2-8x times faster than multiview rendering, with similar comparable quality. 

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3. Spatiotemporal reservoir resampling for real-time ray tracing with dynamic direct lighting

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3386569.3392481  

   Bitterli, Benedikt; Wyman, Chris; Pharr, Matt; Shirley, Peter; Lefohn, Aaron; Jarosz, Wojciech (July 2020, ACM transactions on graphics)

   Efficiently rendering direct lighting from millions of dynamic light sources using Monte Carlo integration remains a challenging problem, even for off-line rendering systems. We introduce a new algorithm—ReSTIR—that renders such lighting interactively, at high quality, and without needing to maintain complex data structures. We repeatedly resample a set of candidate light samples and apply further spatial and temporal resampling to leverage information from relevant nearby samples. We derive an unbiased Monte Carlo estimator for this approach, and show that it achieves equal-error 6×-60× faster than state-of-the-art methods. A biased estimator reduces noise further and is 35×-65× faster, at the cost of some energy loss. We implemented our approach on the GPU, rendering complex scenes containing up to 3.4 million dynamic, emissive triangles in under 50 ms per frame while tracing at most 8 rays per pixel. 

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4. Eye-Based Point Rendering for Dynamic Multiview Effects

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3585513  

   Gavane, Ajinkya; Watson, Benjamin (May 2023, Proceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques)

   Eye-based point rendering (EPR) can make multiview effects much more practical by adding eye (camera) buffer resolution efficiencies to improved view-independent rendering (iVIR). We demonstrate this very successfully by applying EPR to dynamic cube-mapped reflections, sometimes achieving nearly 7× speedups over iVIR and traditional multiview rendering (MVR), with nearly equivalent quality. Our application to omnidirectional soft shadows is less successful, demonstrating that EPR is most effective with larger shader loads and tight eye buffer to off-screen (render target) buffer mappings. This is due to EPR's eye buffer resolution constraints limiting points and shading calculations to the sampling rate of the eye's viewport. In a 2.48 million triangle scene with 50 reflective objects (using 300 off-screen views), EPR renders environment maps with a 49.40ms average frame time on an NVIDIA 1080 Ti GPU. In doing so, EPR generates up to 5x fewer points than iVIR, and regularly performs 50× fewer shading calculations than MVR. 

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5. UnityPIC: Unity Point-Cloud Interactive Core

   https://doi.org/10.2312/pgv20211044  

   Wu, Y.; Vo, H.; Gong, J.; Zhu, Z. (June 2021, Parallel graphics and visualisation)

   M. Hadwiger, M. Larsen (Ed.)

   In this work, we present Unity Point-Cloud Interactive Core, a novel interactive point cloud rendering pipeline for the Unity Development Platform. The goal of the proposed pipeline is to expedite the development process for point cloud applications by encapsulating the rendering process as a standalone component, while maintaining flexibility through an implementable interface. The proposed pipeline allows for rendering arbitrarily large point clouds with improved performance and visual quality. First, a novel dynamic batching scheme is proposed to address the adaptive point sizing problem for level-of-detail (LOD) point cloud structures. Then, an approximate rendering algorithm is proposed to reduce overdraw by minimizing the overall number of fragment operations through an intermediate occlusion culling pass. For the purpose of analysis, the visual quality of renderings is quantified and measured by comparing against a high-quality baseline. In the experiments, the proposed pipeline maintains above 90 FPS for a 20 million point budget while achieving greater than 90% visual quality during interaction when rendering a point-cloud with more than 20 billion points. 

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