From mmp at pbrt.org Wed Oct 13 17:54:32 2004 From: mmp at pbrt.org (Matt Pharr) Date: Wed Oct 13 17:54:37 2004 Subject: [Pbrt-announce] Two new plugins posted to pbrt.org website Message-ID: We've posted two new plugins to the pbrt website, both with source code as well as short PDFs of literate programs that go through their implementations (just like all of the stuff in the book.) See to download them. The first implements an improved importance sampling method for "infinite area lights", a.k.a. environment map light sources. The method is easy to implement but substantially reduces variance in rendered images by accounting for the directional variation of brightness in the environment map. The second implements Wald et al's "instant global illumination" algorithm. This technique is effectively a bidirectional path tracing method that re-uses a small number of paths over all pixels in the image. It does so in a way that gives a result with no noise due to Monte Carlo variance, instead accepting correlation in error across all pixels in the image. It is extremely fast, often on the order of 20% slower than just rendering an image with direct illumination only. -matt