Nvidia Corporation

Chris Wyman

Alexey Panteleev

Jakub Boksansky

Systems and methods described relate to the generation of image content. In order to provide for smoothing between sequential images, but avoid introducing lag into lighting effects, light information can be compared for regions between consecutive rendered frames. Shading can be performed and the results compared for tiles of pixels to compute gradient values, such as by using a single light sample for each tile. A filtering pass can be performed with respect to these gradients, and this filtered, lower-resolution grid version can be upscaled into a full resolution, screen-sized image and the gradients transformed into confidence values. These confidence values can be used to determine an extent to which to keep lighting data from the previous frame with respect to the current frame. For example, less lighting information can be used from the prior frame for a given pixel location if the confidence for that location is lower.

Illumination resampling using temporal gradients in light transport simulation systems and applications

Approaches in accordance with various illustrative embodiments provide for the selection and reuse of lighting sample data to generate high quality initial candidates, suitable for input to resampling techniques, that are better representative of the actual lighting of a scene for which an image, video frame, or other such representation is to be rendered. Instead of discarding an important light samples where weight or sample count may no longer be reliable, at least some of these samples can be provided as additional, unweighted candidates for use in importance sampling, in addition to those selected using a random (or semi-random) sampling process. Such an approach can help to ensure that important lights are considered when shading pixels for a scene, at least where such reuse makes sense due to changes in scene or location. Samples reused between frames can relate to various prior samples, such as samples that were determined to correspond to important, close, or bright lights.

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Redmond, WA, United States of America

Chris Wyman