pathTracer Element Reference

Unbiased path tracer with support for efficient direct illumination. More...

Inheritance diagram for pathTracer:

List of all members.

Attributes
unsigned int	noRenderThreads
	Number of core rendering threads to use during rendering.
unsigned int	noDirectSamples
	Number of direct "shadow rays" to sample from area light sources during evaluation of direct illumination.
generator	directSampleGenerator
generator	generator
	generator to use to generate samples over the film plane
bool	efficientDirect
	Whether or not to enable efficient sampling of direct illumination.

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Detailed Description

Unbiased path tracer with support for efficient direct illumination.

Path tracing provides for a brute-force estimator of Kajiya's rendering equation by averaging the contributions from a large number of random "light" walks throughout the space of all paths through a scene. Certain paths end up being more important to the resulting image that our camera or eye sees, and for the most part, path tracing does a poor job of concentrating effort on these important paths. The path tracing implementation in Milton optionally allows for efficient evaluation of direct illumination (visually the most important paths contributing to the final image).

Note:

pathTracer corresponds to the underlying Milton class 'PathTracer.'

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Attribute Documentation

unsigned int pathTracer::noRenderThreads

Number of core rendering threads to use during rendering.

Rendering in Milton is highly concurrent and is designed from the ground up to scale well with an increasing number of processors on the underlying machine. Choosing too few threads will drastically affect the performance of Milton by not taking advantage of all available resources. On the other hand, choosing too many threads may bottleneck the system and cause cache / memory thrashing from frequent time sharing between the threads across an insufficient number of available processors. A good rule of thumb is to choose noRenderThreads to be about 2 times the number of available processors. i.e., if you're on a quad-core machine, setting noRenderThreads to 8 or 10 will yield optional usage of the 4 available processors.

type	unsigned integer
optional	true
default	8

unsigned int pathTracer::noDirectSamples

Number of direct "shadow rays" to sample from area light sources during evaluation of direct illumination.

type	unsigned integer
optional	true
default	1

generator pathTracer::directSampleGenerator

type	generator
optional	true
default	jittered

generator pathTracer::generator

generator to use to generate samples over the film plane

type	generator
optional	true
default	super

bool pathTracer::efficientDirect

Whether or not to enable efficient sampling of direct illumination.

Note:

Path tracing converges much, much quicker in practice with efficient direct illumination enabled

type	boolean
optional	true
default	true