OllieBrown

With the end of GSoC approaching I want to take inventory of what has been achieved so far. To reiterate I do fully intend to stick with this and keep improving lighter2, assuming I have not overstayed my welcome.

Here's some results. I've spent today rendering images so that I can show what I can achieve with my photon mapper when I hold it's hand and try my best to get good results.

First up, an image of the Cornell Box with just basic raytracing. This scene was rendered with global ambient turned off, all lights forced to realistic attenuation and all light power scaled by 8.0, as such:

lighter2 --directlight=raytracer --noglobalambient --forcerealistic --lmdensity=20.0 --lightpowerscale=8.0 data/NewCornell

This image uses light maps with direct light only computed with raytracing. Note the dark shadows and the relatively small amount of light on the ceiling.

Next, an image of the Cornell Box with just Photon Mapping (for both direct and indirect light). Here we shot 5M photons and sampled 5K times for each density estimation. The command line was like such:

lighter2 --directlight=photonmapper --indirectlight=photonmapper --numphotons=5000000 --maxdensitysamples=5000 --sampledistance=20.0 --nofinalgather --lmdensity=20.0 --pmlightscale=100.0 data/NewCornell

This image shows the results of lighter2 photon mapping only. The image captures all of the major features of the raytraced image (shadows, shapes of light attenuation) but it also captures some indirect light (though not yet with color). The shadows and ceiling are brighter in this image than in the raytraced image. Unfortunately, the noise is still too high but better than it has been all summer.

Lastly, an image of the Cornell Box with direct light done with raytracing and indirect light with photon mapping. It was VERY difficult to get the two values to have a comprable exposure (i.e. photon mapping was consistently too dark). Recent changes to the way light is scattered have made this matter worse but are conceptually necessary to get the simulation to be correct. Needless to say, I had to fudge the light power manually until the image 'looked' okay. Very imprecise but good enough for today. Here's what the final command line looked like. Note that I bumped the number of photons up to 25M to help fight noise which can be particularly noticeable for indirect lighting:

lighter2 --directlight=raytracer --noglobalambient --forcerealistic --lightpowerscale=8.0 --indirectlight=photonmapper --numphotons=25000000 --maxdensitysamples=5000 --sampledistance=20.0 --nofinalgather --lmdensity=20.0 --pmlightscale=16.0 data/NewCornell

This image shows the results of lighter2 combining raytracing and photon mapping (for direct and indirect light respectively). Note the brighter shadows and ceiling as well as the indirect brightening happening on the rear box. All of this increases the realism of the final image at the expense of noise but also requires significant hand-holding and tweaking of variables to achieve.

The code I check in today will be able to do all of this. Note that I used an old version of walktest.exe to render these images (from the 08 SOC branch for lighter2). The one in my branch is still not working with light maps for unknown reasons.

My handling of light attenuation turned out to be incorrect. Res and Martin set me straight. I had the conceptual model that distance attenuation accounts for the phenomenon of light losing power as it travels through a medium (even just the atmosphere). This is called attenuation in physics and optics but in graphics this is not what distance attenuation is accounting for. Distance attenuation accounts for the fact that as light moves away from its source the energy spreads out (I assume like a wavefront spreading out). It does so like the surface of a sphere so the 'realistic' distance^2 factor accounts for this spreading out perfectly.

The consequence of this type of attenuation (the correct type) is that photon mapping attenuates automatically. We are distributing photons equally around the sphere of the light source and when they land they will be distributed according to how far away they are from the light. The density of this distribution already has this spreading effect built in automatically.

So, to really do calibration between raytracing and photon mapping I need to remove the attenuation from the photons (already done) and then switch all the lights to use 'realistic' attenuation (which is not the default). My apologies to res for second guessing his advice as this was his original suggestion. As soon as I did this it became apparent that things were dramatically more comparable between raytracing and photon mapping:

	Raytracer	Photon Mapper
4.0
6.0
8.0
10.0
12.0

These images show the results of direct lighting computed with the raytracer and the photon mapper. Each one is given the exact same input however they do not result in the exact same output. Furthermore, the difference is not constant or linear. Note that the images shown above match the range of the graph below from the lower knee up to the point that the curves cross (16 - 48 on the x-axis).

As you can see, despite the similarity resulting from the change to realistic attenuation there is still a marked difference in the exposure of the two. After revisiting this from many different angles, over and over again, and after changing the code in different ways and attempting both a mathetamical and visual calibration I've decided that this issue is going to have to wait. Here's an example of the problem:

This graph compares the average luminance of the images generated by raytracing and photon mapping for light sources ranging from 0.25 to 50.0 in power (in 1.0 increments). There are four lights in the scene so this is a scene luminance from 1 to 200 (the x-axis of the graph). Note that the shape of the two curves is essentially the same (a standard exposure curve with a knee and shoulder) but that the have significant differences in where the curves features are occurring.

Note that the raytracing and photon mapping graphs have similar but miss-aligned shapes. This miss-alignment is the problem. There is no easy way to simply fudge things and fix it as it will be entirely dependent on the scene being rendered. Furthermore, I'm starting to think (after talking with colleagues) that there is a mistake somewhere in either the RT code or the PM code that is causing this miss-alignment and simply fudging things to fix it is not a permanent solution (or one that I should be spending so much time on).

So, three days gone on this but at least I have something to show for it. New configuration options! (well, and a lot of frustration!) Here's the new options:

'forcerealistic' - This option can be enabled or disabled and will force all the static and pseudo-dynamic lights in a world to use 'realistic' attenuation mode. This saves the trouble of having to re-do your world in order to use it with photon mapping.

'lightpowerscale' - Scale all the lights in a scene by the given scaling factor. This scale is applied to the light color which is essentially the same as it's power. When you use 'forcerealistic' things tend to get much darker so the lights need to be scaled up to compensate. Again, this option avoids having to edit the world file to achieve this.

'pmlightscale' - Like 'lightpowerscale' this will scale all the static and pseudo dynamic lights in the scene but only for the photon mapping phase. This is in addition to any scaling applied by 'lightpowerscale'. This allows you to fudge things from the command line and bring the exposure of the photon mapping simulation and the raytracer in line with one another.