New Project

I am implementing bidirectional path tracing (BPT) and Metropolis Light Transport (MLT) as an independent study project at Penn.

I finished thoroughly reading and understanding Eric Veach's PhD thesis (and some other resources, which I'll talk about later), and now I'm moving on to the implementation. After working through Veach's thesis, I feel like I have a much deeper understanding of the rigorous mathematical theory behind rendering, as well as a strong understanding of the algorithms that I will be implementing. And I think that the math I've learned (in particular, some relatively advanced probability and calculus) will be useful outside the context of rendering, in a wide variety of subject areas.

I'm planning on making some progress on the implementation over spring break. I think the implementation will go pretty smoothly since I've already put much effort into learning and planning.

Adding bidirectional path tracing and MLT directly to my existing renderer Photorealizer would be very difficult because it would require significant refactoring of the path tracing core, and significant effort to integrate with the many existing features. Instead, I will start by creating a new, streamlined version of Photorealizer. Bidirectional path tracing and MLT will be relatively difficult to implement correctly, so I will first focus on implementing them well, making them work perfectly, and making the code clean, fast, and extensible. Then later I can add extra features.

I will start by implementing bidirectional path tracing, making both sensors and lights part of the scene, writing utilities for creating paths from both sensors and lights, manipulating paths, computing the correct contribution of paths, using multiple importance sampling to weight the paths in an optimal way, and more. Then I'd like to add support for participating media (which isn't covered in Veach's thesis, but has been derived by others). Once bidirectional path tracing is complete, I will then be able to implement MLT. Like bidirectional path tracing, MLT uses the path integral formulation of light transport. Furthermore, MLT uses bidirectional path tracing directly to create seed paths, and it uses bidirectional path tracing concepts to mutate paths.

I plan to post more specific implementation details, progress updates, and pictures on this new blog.