4 ms·
This is basically Nerf but without support for transparent / translucent / subsurface / glossy / refractive objects.
by fxtentacle 5y ago
This is basically Nerf but without support for transparent / translucent / subsurface / glossy / refractive objects.
- natly 5y agoI mean this is way cooler than nerfs in my opinion. This is just ray tracing (a fairly tractable rendering solution on todays GPUs - whereas nerfs are usually huge on the size and compute fronts) except here the whole pipeline from object to image is differentiable which means you could use it to feed an image in and generate a plausible underlying mesh for it. (Which you can then apply regular physics simulation to or whatever which would have been a pain/impossible with nerfs.)
- gfodor 5y agoSDFs do not dictate how you approximate the rendering equation beyond the fact that they are a useful way to describe surfaces. (So, for example, they are mismatched with volumetric rendering.) The characteristics you cite are generally satisfied through the BSSRDF or other material models in conjunction with surface intersection tests, not by raymarching through scattering material. NeRFs solve the entire problem differently by creating a radiance sampling oracle in the form of a neural network. So in other words, yes, you can certainly use SDFs to render those physical effects you mention. Claiming these are comparable to NeRF is pretty misleading, anyway, because NeRF is modeling a scene in a fundamentally different way than surface + material representations, with (other) distinct tradeoffs between the two methods.