Importance Sampling Techniques for Path Tracing in Participating Media

Christopher Kulla and Marcos Fajardo

In Computer Graphics Forum (Proceedings of EGSR 2012)

Abstract

We introduce a set of robust importance sampling techniques which allow efficient calculation of direct and indirect lighting from arbitrary light sources in both homogeneous and heterogeneous media. We show how to distribute samples along a ray proportionally to the incoming radiance for point and area lights. In heterogeneous media, we decouple ray marching from light calculations by computing a representation of the transmittance function that can be quickly evaluated during sampling. This representation also allows the calculation of another probability density function which can direct samples to regions most likely to scatter light. These techniques are orthogonal and can be combined via multiple importance sampling to further reduce variance. Our method has very modest per-ray memory requirements and does not require any preprocessing, making it simple to integrate into production ray tracing based renderers.

Errata

There was a small mistake in equation 8 in the version included in the proceedings. The exponents in the denominator should not be negated. This has been fixed in the version below. Reported by Matt Pharr.