Recent advances in neural rendering have mainly focused on modeling radiance fields with neural representations, often overlooking the underlying mechanisms for producing various lighting effects, and consequently leading to the limited adaptability to dynamic scenes. Lighting effects, such as highlights, shadows, and indirect illuminations, are typically computed using physically-based rendering methods like path tracing, which can be computationally intensive for complex indoor luminaires. Although several recent studies have aimed to model global illumination effects with neural representations, they commonly suffer from long training times or poor generalizability to new scenes. Addressing these challenges, this work presents a novel neural lighting function generation model capable of synthesizing diverse lighting effects in real time for unseen dynamic scenes and complex indoor luminaires, achieving results comparable to state-of-the-art rendering pipelines. Our model operates in two stages. First, multi-view observation images of the luminaire are captured to encode a compact, scene-independent 3D neural lighting field. Subsequently, light information is sampled from this neural lighting field and integrated with G-buffers and shadow clues to produce the shading results. In parallel, we employ a state-of-the-art generative model together with our training-free Inverse HDR Splatting module to generate HDR 3D Gaussians representing the luminaire. This strategy capitalizes on the powerful generalization capabilities of advanced generative models, enabling efficient and accurate appearance reconstruction for a diverse range of complex luminaires. In our experiments, the model trained on a dataset of 10,000 modern indoor scenes and thousands of illuminations demonstrates strong generalizability, high efficiency, and visually convincing results across a wide range of test scenes, highlighting its potential as a practical and flexible solution for high-fidelity, real-time neural indoor rendering.

Recent advances in cloud rendering have brought us a promising alternative for interactive photorealistic rendering on lightweight devices, which used to be only available on high-end platforms equipped with powerful graphic cards. This technique enables users to perform rendering-related creative tasks, such as 3D product visualization and lighting design, from the comfort of any location using handheld devices, rather than being confined to the front of a noisy heat-generating workstation. However, existing large-scale cloud rendering systems that stream path-traced frames from the server to the client present extremely high rendering costs and transmission bandwidth requirements, even with advanced path-tracing acceleration and video compression techniques. To alleviate these problems, we propose a novel streaming-aware rendering framework that is able to learn a joint optimal model integrating two path-tracing acceleration techniques (adaptive sampling and denoising) and video compression technique. Our joint model can fully exploit the inherent connections between these techniques and thus achieve substantially reduced rendering costs and enhanced compression quality. We also introduce the collaboration of client rendering ability to assist the frame decoding by rendering G-buffers as the shared side information. We demonstrate that appropriately incorporating the geometry and material priors from G-buffers into a neural compression pipeline can significantly reduce the streaming bandwidth in a cloud rendering system, and lighten the compression module design for computation efficiency. Our experiments show that our method delivers the best quality at various bitrates compared to existing Monte Carlo rendering streaming schemes, while remaining lightweight and efficient for cross-platform thin clients, including mobiles and tablets.

The workload of real-time rendering is steeply increasing as the demand for high resolution, high refresh rates, and high realism rises, overwhelming most graphics cards. To mitigate this problem, one of the most popular solutions is to render images at a low resolution to reduce rendering overhead, and then manage to accurately upsample the low-resolution rendered image to the target resolution, a.k.a. super-resolution techniques. Most existing methods focus on exploiting information from low-resolution inputs, such as historical frames. The absence of high frequency details in those LR inputs makes them hard to recover fine details in their high-resolution predictions. In this paper, we propose an efficient and effective super-resolution method that predicts high-quality upsampled reconstructions utilizing low-cost high-resolution auxiliary G-Buffers as additional input. With LR images and HR G-buffers as input, the network requires to align and fuse features at multi resolution levels. We introduce an efficient and effective H-Net architecture to solve this problem and significantly reduce rendering overhead without noticeable quality deterioration. Experiments show that our method is able to produce temporally consistent reconstructions in 4 × 4 and even challenging 8 × 8 upsampling cases at 4K resolution with real-time performance, with substantially improved quality and significant performance boost compared to existing works.Project page: https://isaac-paradox.github.io/FuseSR/

This article presents object-oriented neural light transfer (NeLT), a novel neural representation of the dynamic light transportation between an object and the environment. Our method disentangles the global illumination of a scene into individual objects’ light transportation represented via neural networks, then composes them explicitly. It therefore enables flexible rendering with dynamic lighting, cameras, materials, and objects. Our rendering features various important global illumination effects, such as diffuse illumination, glossy illumination, dynamic shadowing, and indirect illumination, which completes the capability of existing neural object representation. Experiments show that NeLT does not require path tracing or shading results as input but achieves rendering quality comparable to state-of-the-art rendering frameworks, including the recent deep learning based denoisers.

In this article, we introduce a compact representation for measured BRDFs by leveraging Neural Processes (NPs). Unlike prior methods that express those BRDFs as discrete high-dimensional matrices or tensors, our technique considers measured BRDFs as continuous functions and works in corresponding function spaces . Specifically, provided the evaluations of a set of BRDFs, such as ones in MERL and EPFL datasets, our method learns a low-dimensional latent space as well as a few neural networks to encode and decode these measured BRDFs or new BRDFs into and from this space in a non-linear fashion. Leveraging this latent space and the flexibility offered by the NPs formulation, our encoded BRDFs are highly compact and offer a level of accuracy better than prior methods. We demonstrate the practical usefulness of our approach via two important applications, BRDF compression and editing. Additionally, we design two alternative post-trained decoders to, respectively, achieve better compression ratio for individual BRDFs and enable importance sampling of BRDFs.