Practical Product Sampling for Single Scattering in Media

Abstract

Efficient Monte-Carlo estimation of volumetric single scattering remains challenging due to various sources of variance, including transmittance, phase-function anisotropy, geometric cosine foreshortening, and squared-distance fall-off. We propose several complementary techniques to importance sample each of these terms and their product. First, we introduce an extension to equi-angular sampling to analytically account for the foreshortening at point-normal emitters. We then include transmittance and phase function via Taylor-series expansion and/or warp composition. Scaling to complex mesh emitters is achieved through an adaptive tree-splitting scheme. We show improved performance over state-of-the-art baselines in a diversity of scenarios.