TUM Paper Renders Volumetric Lighting in Real Time Without Path Tracing
ssh4net · x · 2026-11-11
Ludwig Leonard and Rüdiger Westermann (Technical University of Munich) present a real-time method for reconstructing fully integrated pixel radiance in volumetric media without path tracing.
- Infers the final light-transport solution directly from cheap primary-ray and environment-sample features, argued to be a near-sufficient scene representation
- Uses an attention-augmented image-to-image network; on an RTX 5090 it reconstructs global illumination for unseen clouds in 10ms vs 50s for path-traced reference
- Outperforms Intel OIDN and dedicated volumetric denoisers (39.5dB at 32.9ms), while MRPNN stays noisy even at 1024 samples and costs 15+ seconds
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