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Hybrid and Non-Hybrid rendering for diffuse global illumination in Real-Time applications

Nikolaidis Dimitrios

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Summary

In the past decades, advances in real-time graphics have pushed the limit of realistic rendering. One of the most critical elements in achieving visual realism is lighting, specifically global illumination (GI). When correctly modeled, indirect light in a scene significantly contributes to enhancing rendering fidelity and realism. Ray and path tracing techniques are a standard way for accurately modeling light transport and in producing lighting effects. Recent GPU architectures have introduced hardware-accelerated ray-tracing features, making ray-tracing in real-time applications viable. This has given rise to the popularity of a new class of rendering approach known as hybrid rendering. These techniques combine traditional rasterization and hardware-accelerated ray tracing to balance speed and realism.In this thesis, we aim to study hybrid and non-hybrid rendering in global illumination. This was achieved by first implementing a hybrid renderer using the Vulkan API. The renderer leverages the Dynamic Diffuse Global Illumination (DDGI) technique to generate global illumination. This hybrid technique discretizes a scene with robes and collects radiance and visibility using ray tracing and rasterization. In this way, it can handle complex scenes and lighting changes while maintaining interactive performance. Deferred rendering, variance shadow mapping, and screen space ambient occlusion (SSAO) were implemented for this renderer to produce effects like shadows, ambient occlusion, and direct illumination.A path-traced non-hybrid renderer was also implemented to provide a baseline for evaluation using the same scene representation and the Vulkan API. This allows for a direct visual comparison of the hybrid renderer’s results. We compared the performance and visual fidelity of the hybrid renderer with the path tracer by analyzing visual results and metrics such as frame time (ms) and structural similarity index (SSIM). Our analysis of these results shows that this implementation of a hybrid renderer can produce global illumination in real-time. These results are comparable to those of the path tracers, while producing minimal visual artifacts. The findings underscore this hybrid renderer’s potential to generate global illumination in interactive applications and to produce photorealistic results.

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