Spectral domain decomposition method for physically-based rendering of Royaumont abbey

TL;DR

This paper presents a spectral domain decomposition method to enhance physically-based rendering of the Royaumont abbey, combining historical modeling, material measurement, and parallelized ray-tracing to improve computational efficiency.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel spectral domain decomposition technique for parallelizing ray-tracing in physically-based rendering, significantly reducing computation time.

Findings

Spectral domain decomposition accelerates rendering computations.

Material property measurements inform realistic rendering.

Parallelization outperforms classic methods in efficiency.

Abstract

In the context of a virtual reconstitution of the destroyed Royaumont abbey church, this paper investigates computer sciences issues intrinsic to the physically-based image rendering. First, a virtual model was designed from historical sources and archaeological descriptions. Then some materials physical properties were measured on remains of the church and on pieces from similar ancient churches. We specify the properties of our lighting source which is a representation of the sun, and present the rendering algorithm implemented in our software Virtuelium. In order to accelerate the computation of the interactions between light-rays and objects, this ray-tracing algorithm is parallelized by means of domain decomposition techniques. Numerical experiments show that the computational time saved by a classic parallelization is much less significant than that gained with our approach.