Level-of-Detail for Production-Scale Path Tracing

Abstract

Path-traced global illumination (GI) becomes increasingly important in movie production. With offscreen elements considerably contributing to the path traced image, geometric complexity increases drastically, requiring geometric instancing or a variety of manually created and baked LOD. To reduce artists' work load and bridge the gap between mesh-based LOD (Mip-maps) and voxel-based LOD (brickmaps), we propose to use an SVO with averaged BRDF parameters, e.g. for the Disney-BRDF, and a normal distribution per voxel. During shading we construct a BRDF from the averaged BRDF parameters and evaluate it with a random normal sampled from the distribution. This is simple, memory-efficient, and handles a wide variety of geometry scales and materials seamlessly, with proper filtering. Further it is efficient to construct, which allows quick artist iterations as well as automatic and lazy generation on scene loading.