Exercises

  1. It’s possible to implement a specialized version of ScrambledRadicalInverse() for base 2, along the lines of the implementation in RadicalInverse(). Determine how to map the random digit permutation to a single bitwise operation and implement this approach. Compare the values computed to those generated by the current implementation to ensure your method is correct and measure how much faster yours is by writing a small benchmark program.
  2. Currently, the third through fifth dimensions of each sample vector are consumed for time and lens samples, even though not all scenes need these sample values. Because lower dimensions in the sample vector are often better distributed than later ones, this can cause an unnecessary reduction in image quality. Modify pbrt so that the camera can report its sample requirements and then use this information when samples are requested to initialize CameraSamples. Don’t forget to update the value of GlobalSampler::arrayStartDim. Render images with the DirectLightingIntegrator and compare results to the current implementation. Do you see an improvement? How do results differ with different samplers? How do you explain any differences you see across samplers?
  3. Implement the improved multi-jittered sampling method introduced by Kensler (2013) as a new Sampler in pbrt. Compare image quality and rendering time to rendering with the StratifiedSampler, the HaltonSampler, and the SobolSampler.
  4. Keller (2004) and Dammertz and Keller (2008b) described the application of rank-1 lattices to image synthesis. Rank-1 lattices are another way of efficiently generating high-quality low-discrepancy sequences of sample points. Read their papers and implement a Sampler based on this approach. Compare results to the other samplers in pbrt.
  5. With pbrt’s current FilmTile implementation, the pixel values in an image may change by small amounts if an image is rerendered, due to threads finishing tiles in different orders over subsequent runs. For example, a pixel that had a final value that came from samples from three different image sampling tiles, v 1 plus v 2 plus v 3 , may sometimes have its value computed as left-parenthesis v 1 plus v 2 right-parenthesis plus v 3 and sometimes as v 1 plus left-parenthesis v 2 plus v 3 right-parenthesis . Due to floating-point round-off, these two values may be different. While these differences aren’t normally a problem, they wreak havoc with automated testing scripts that might want to verify that a believed-to-be-innocuous change to the system didn’t actually cause any differences in rendered images. Modify Film::MergeFilmTile() so that it merges tiles in a consistent order so that final pixel values don’t suffer from this inconsistency. (For example, your implementation might buffer up FilmTiles and only merge a tile when all neighboring tiles above and to its left have already been merged.) Ensure that your implementation doesn’t introduce any meaningful performance regression. Measure the additional memory usage due to longer lived FilmTiles; how does it relate to total memory usage?
  6. As mentioned in Section 7.9, the Film::AddSplat() method doesn’t use a filter function but instead just splats the sample to the single pixel it’s closest to, effectively using a box filter. In order to apply an arbitrary filter, the filter must be normalized so that it integrates to one over its domain; this constraint isn’t currently required of Filters by pbrt. Modify the computation of filterTable in the Film constructor so that the tabulated function is normalized. (Don’t forget that the table only stores one-quarter of the function’s extent when computing the normalization factor.) Then modify the implementation of the AddSplat() method to use this filter. Investigate the execution time and image quality differences that result.
  7. Modify pbrt to create images where the value stored in the Film for each camera ray is proportional to the time taken to compute the ray’s radiance. (A 1-pixel-wide box filter is probably the most useful filter for this exercise.) Render images of a variety of scenes with this technique. What insight about the system’s performance do the resulting images bring? You may need to scale pixel values or take their logarithm to see meaningful variation when you view them.
  8. One of the advantages of the linearity assumption in radiometry is that the final image of a scene is the same as the sum of individual images that account for each light source’s contribution (assuming a floating-point image file format is used that doesn’t clip pixel radiance values). An implication of this property is that if a renderer creates a separate image for each light source, it is possible to write interactive lighting design tools that make it possible to quickly see the effects of scaling the contributions of individual lights in the scene without needing to rerender it from scratch. Instead, a light’s individual image can be scaled and the final image regenerated by summing all of the light images again. (This technique was first applied for opera lighting design by Dorsey, Sillion, and Greenberg (1991).) Modify pbrt to output a separate image for each of the lights in the scene, and write an interactive lighting design tool that uses them in this manner.
  9. Mitchell and Netravali (1988) noted that there is a family of reconstruction filters that use both the value of a function and its derivative at the point to do substantially better reconstruction than if just the value of the function is known. Furthermore, they report that they have derived closed-form expressions for the screen space derivatives of Lambertian and Phong reflection models, although they do not include these expressions in their paper. Investigate derivative-based reconstruction, and extend pbrt to support this technique. Because it will likely be difficult to derive expressions for the screen space derivatives for general shapes and BSDF models, investigate approximations based on finite differencing. Techniques built on the ideas behind the ray differentials of Section 10.1 may be fruitful for this effort.
  10. Image-based rendering is the general name for a set of techniques that use one or more images of a scene to synthesize new images from viewpoints different from the original ones. One such approach is light field rendering, where a set of images from a densely spaced set of positions is used (Levoy and Hanrahan 1996; Gortler et al. 1996). Read these two papers on light fields, and modify pbrt to directly generate light fields of scenes, without requiring that the renderer be run multiple times, once for each camera position. It will probably be necessary to write a specialized Camera, Sampler, and Film to do this. Also, write an interactive light field viewer that loads light fields generated by your implementation and generates new views of the scene.
  11. Rather than just storing spectral values in an image, it’s often useful to store additional information about the objects in the scene that were visible at each pixel. See, for example, the SIGGRAPH papers by Perlin (1985a) and Saito and Takahashi (1990). For example, if the 3D position, surface normal, and BRDF of the object at each pixel are stored, then the scene can be efficiently rerendered after moving the light sources (Gershbein and Hanrahan 2000). Alternatively, if each sample stores information about all of the objects visible along its camera ray, rather than just the first one, new images from shifted viewpoints can be rerendered (Shade et al. 1998). Investigate representations for deep frame buffers and algorithms that use them; extend pbrt to support the creation of images like these, and develop tools that operate on them.
  12. Implement a median filter for image reconstruction: for each pixel, store the median of all of the samples within a filter extent around it. This task is complicated by the fact that filters in the current Film implementation must be linear—the value of the filter function is determined solely by the position of the sample with respect to the pixel position, and the value of the sample has no impact on the value of the filter function. Because the implementation assumes that filters are linear, and because it doesn’t store sample values after adding their contribution to the image, implementing the median filter will require generalizing the Film or developing a new Film implementation. Render images using integrators like the PathIntegrator that have objectionable image noise with regular image filters. How successful is the median filter at reducing noise? Are there visual shortcomings to using the median filter? Can you implement this approach without needing to store all of the image sample values before computing final pixel values?
  13. An alternative to the median filter is to discard the sample with the lowest contribution and the sample with the largest contribution in a pixel’s filter region. This approach uses more of the information gathered during sampling. Implement this approach and compare the results to the median filter.
  14. Implement the discontinuity buffer, as described by Keller and collaborators (Keller 1998; Wald et al. 2002). You will probably need to modify the interface to the Integrators so that they can separately return direct and indirect illumination contributions and then pass these separately to the Film. Render images showing its effectiveness when rendering images with indirect illumination.
  15. Implement one of the recent adaptive sampling and reconstruction techniques such as the ones described by Hachisuka et al. (2008a), Egan et al. (2009), Overbeck et al. (2009), or Moon et al. (2014). How much more efficiently do they generate images of equal quality than just uniformly sampling at a high rate? How do they affect running time for simple scenes where adaptive sampling isn’t needed?
  16. Investigate current research in tone reproduction algorithms (see, e.g., Reinhard et al. 2010; 2012), and implement one or more of these algorithms. Use your implementation with a number of scenes rendered by pbrt, and discuss the improvements you see compared to viewing the images without tone reproduction.