Abstract

We introduce a new hardware-accelerated method for constructing Deep G-buffers that is 2x-8x faster than the previous depth peeling method and produces more stable results. We then build several high-performance shading algorithms atop our representation, including dynamic diffuse interreflection, ambient occlusion (AO), and mirror reflection effects.

Our construction method s order-independent, guarantees a minimum separation between layers, operates in a (small) bounded memory footprint, and does not require per-pixel sorting. Moreover, addressing the increasingly expensive cost of pre-rasterization, our approach requires only a single pass over the scene geometry. Our global illumination algorithms approach the speed of the fastest screen-space AO-only techniques while significantly exceeding their quality: we capture small-scale details and complex radiometric effects more robustly than screen-space techniques, and we implicitly handle dynamic illumination conditions. We include the pseudocode for our Deep G-buffer construction in the paper and the full source code of our technique in our supplemental document.

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BibTex

@inproceedings{Mara2016DeepGBuffer, 
  author = {Michael Mara and Morgan McGuire and Derek Nowrouzezahrai and David Luebke}, 
  title = {Deep G-Buffers for Stable Global Illumination Approximation}, 
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the High Performance Graphics 2016},
  note = {HPG},
  month = {June},
  day = {24},
  year = {2016}, 
  pages = {11},
  url = {https://casual-effects.com/research/Mara2016DeepGBuffer/index.html}, 
}