Weekly Report #1 (6/13 - 6/19):
This week, I completed an initial CPU implementation of the light tree with support for point lights, spot lights, and area lights. I’ve also written a longer and more technical post if anyone is interested. The scenes I tested consisted of a single cube, no background light, and some light sources scattered around. Here’s an example with 1 point light, 1 spot light, and 1 area light - 8192 samples:
Overall, my implementation’s renders seem to converge towards the original implementation’s renders given enough samples. However, as you can see in the above image, there is definitely a lot more work that needs to be done in terms of adjusting heuristics to reduce noise. Optimizations are also going to take place once the algorithm is deemed stable enough.
Objective for Week #2:
I’d like to complete the following for next week:
- Implement support for emissive triangles
- Implement support for distant lights and background light
- I’ll be joining the bi-weekly rendering meeting to discuss how to handle this (since they need to be handled outside of the light tree)
- Read up on light sampling from volumes in preparation for implementing light tree traversal inside of participating media