Thoughts on including Specular Manifold Sampling (Metropolis implementation)

[Eary]

@Eary

it seems there is a “training time” going on before rendering, I am not sure if that “training” is a “once and for all” thing or something you need to do to every scene before each render.

I just read some more about it, still not really sure what it is, but I kind of get the idea that it is a per-render thing, so basically it needs to be done every time we hit render.

There is still a thing buggin me though, here a video on YouTube mentioned the method in that paper:

What does he mean by “online training”? Is this “online” referring to “Internet connection”? I don’t really think it makes much sense so I believe the answer is no, but what does this online mean?

Also, upon searching in DevTalk, I found this:

RTX GPU Support

Well, yes, that comes back to the online guiding topic a bit - for example, the “Practical Path Guiding” paper caches a spatial radiance estimate which could be used for secondary bounces (they use it for a heuristic that determines path splitting/termination). Something like that could be added to Cycles, but there are a few implementation questions - for example, the cache is built during rendering, so we’d need to either do a prepass or do some hybrid scheme where the GPU renders as usual wh…

Well, yes, that comes back to the online guiding topic a bit

Online guiding?

I am confused