NVIDIA recently published Ray Tracing Gems, a deep-dive into best practices for real-time ray tracing. The book was made free-to-download, to help all developers embrace the bleeding edge of rendering technology.
Ray Tracing Essentials is a seven-part video series hosted by the editor of Ray Tracing Gems, NVIDIA’s Eric Haines. The aim of this program is to make developers aware of various terms and concepts used in the field, while also inspiring them with dramatic and beautiful uses of the technology. This post is about the seventh and final video in this series, Denoising for Ray Tracing.
A critical element in making realistic, high-quality images with ray tracing at interactive rates is the process of denoising. Using path tracing will (eventually) give the right answer, but there is a diminishing return for each new ray shot.
To keep performance interactive, various denoising techniques can be used to clean up the wide variance sometimes seen when only a few rays are shot. The two main denoising approaches are human-controlled algorithms and those created by training neural networks.
Denoising can provide usable images in a tiny fraction of a second.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
- A raytracing resources page
- The free Open Access book Ray Tracing Gems
- Ray Tracing Essentials Part 1: Basics of Ray Tracing
- Ray Tracing Essentials Part 2: Rasterization versus Ray Tracing
- Ray Tracing Essentials Part 3: Ray Tracing Hardware
- Ray Tracing Essentials Part 4: The Ray Tracing Pipeline
- Ray Tracing Essentials Part 5: Ray Tracing Effects
- Ray Tracing Essentials Part 6: The Rendering Equation
- Ray Tracing Essentials Part 7: Denoising for Ray Tracing
You can watch the all of the videos in the series on this YouTube Playlist.
On May 12, Eric Haines will present a live webinar about the Ray Tracing Essentials series. There will be a presentation, live Q&A, plus a giveaway of an NVIDIA TITAN RTX GPU (for live attendees only). Sign up here: https://info.nvidia.com/developer-ray-tracing-webinar-reg-page.html.
