This repository demonstrates interactive wave-optical rendering, and implements core concepts from the PLT series of publications. See relevant papers:
- A Generalized Ray Formulation For Wave-Optics Rendering
- Towards Practical Physical-Optics Rendering
- Physical Light-Matter Interaction in Hermite-Gauss Space
- A Generic Framework for Physical Light Transport
Path tracing is done unidirectionally with generalized rays (wave-optical constructs which generalize the classical rays typically used in rendering to wave optics). The renderer is spectral (with spectral MIS) and polarimetric.
All materials are diffractive, polarization-aware and optical coherence aware. The following PLT materials are implemented:
- Dielectrics
- Conductors
- Coated dielectrics
- Coated conductors
- Diffraction-grated dielectrics
- Diffraction-grated conductors
- Birefringent thin dielectrics
- Alternating multi-layered stacks on a dielectric
All surfaces allow arbitrary roughness (coherence-aware, first-order SPM with a K-Correlation PSD), modelled to match the "look-and-feel" of microfacet GGX roughness, but with correct physics. All conductors use tabulated spectral refractive-indices, and all light sources use spectral emission tables of real light sources (see 'Source/Tables' for tabulated data). Light emission data is from LSPDD.
Manifold sampling (MS) is implemented. MS enables exploring NEE connections through dielectrics, as well as NEE with a delta lobe. This is used to render the dispersive lobes of a diffraction grating, as demonstrated in the images below.
A sample scene with diffractive materials can be found here. Other PBRT, Falcor and mitsuba scenes can be loaded (PBRT and mitsuba importers with limited support), some materials are automatically converted to PLT materials, though probably some manual tuning will be required.
Builds upon the Falcor real-time rendering framework. For more information and additional resources, see the Falcor GitHub page.
Additional rendered images and videos available here.
- Run Mogwai
- Load script 'scripts/PLTPathTracer.py' (or 'scripts/PLTPathTracerNoDenoiser.py')
- Load a scene
To use the OptiX denoiser, OptiX and Cuda should be installed. See below.
- Windows 10 version 20H2 (October 2020 Update) or newer, OS build revision .789 or newer
- Visual Studio 2019
- Windows 10 SDK (10.0.19041.0) for Windows 10, version 2004
- A GPU which supports DirectX Raytracing, such as the NVIDIA Titan V or GeForce RTX
- NVIDIA driver 466.11 or newer
** Note: There is a bug with some NVIDIA drivers (confirmed with 528.49) where manifold sampling (when enabled) fails for the first few hundred or thousand frames, and kicks in afterwards. This is under investigation.
Falcor uses the CMake build system. Additional information on how to use Falcor with CMake is available in the CMake development documetation page.
If you are working with Visual Studio, you can setup a native Visual Studio solution by running setup_vs2019.bat (or setup_vs2022.bat, same process) after cloning this repository. The solution files are written to build/windows-vs2019 and the binary output is located in build/windows-vs2019/bin.
If you are working with Visual Studio Code, run setup.bat after cloning this repository. This will setup a VS Code workspace in the .vscode folder with sensible defaults (only if .vscode does not exist yet). When opening the project folder in VS Code, it will prompt to install recommended extensions. We recommend you do, but at least make sure that CMake Tools is installed. To build Falcor, you can select the configure preset by executing the CMake: Select Configure Preset action (Ctrl+Shift+P). Choose the Windows Ninja/MSVC preset. Then simply hit Build (or press F7) to build the project. The binary output is located in build/windows-ninja-msvc/bin.
Warning: Do not start VS Code from Git Bash, it will modify the PATH environment variable to an incompatible format, leading to issues with CMake.
Falcor uses CMake Presets store in CMakePresets.json to provide a set of commonly used build configurations. You can get the full list of available configure presets running cmake --list-presets:
$ cmake --list-presets
Available configure presets:
"windows-vs2019" - Windows VS2019
"windows-vs2022" - Windows VS2022
"windows-ninja-msvc" - Windows Ninja/MSVC
"linux-ninja-clang" - Linux Ninja/Clang
Use cmake --preset <preset name> to generate the build tree for a given preset. The build tree is written to the build/<preset name> folder and the binary output files are in build/<preset name>/bin.
An existing build tree can be compiled using cmake --build build/<preset name>.
Note: Some render passes (RTXGI, RTXDI, DLSS in particular) are not fully working with the new Slang GFX backend.
Falcor uses the Microsoft DirectX 12 Agility SDK to get access to the latest DirectX 12 features. Applications can enable the Agility SDK by putting FALCOR_EXPORT_D3D12_AGILITY_SDK in the main .cpp file. Mogwai, FalcorTest and RenderGraphEditor have the Agility SDK enabled by default.
To enable NVAPI support, head over to https://developer.nvidia.com/nvapi and download the latest version of NVAPI (this build is tested against version R520).
Extract the content of the zip file into external/packman/ and rename R520-developer to nvapi.
To enable CUDA support, download and install CUDA 11.6.2 or later and reconfigure the build.
See the CudaInterop sample application located in Source/Samples/CudaInterop for an example of how to use CUDA.
If you want to use Falcor's OptiX functionality (specifically the OptixDenoiser render pass) download the OptiX SDK (Falcor is currently tested against OptiX version 7.6) After running the installer, link or copy the OptiX SDK folder into external/packman/optix (i.e., file external/packman/optix/include/optix.h should exist).
Note: You also need CUDA installed to compile the OptixDenoiser render pass, see above for details.
- Falcor: Falcor's GitHub page.
- Documentation: Additional information and tutorials.
- Rendering Resources A collection of scenes loadable in Falcor (pbrt-v4 format).
- ORCA: A collection of scenes and assets optimized for Falcor.
- Slang: Falcor's shading language and compiler.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
