Faster RPNN: Rendering Clouds with Latent Space Light Probes

Abstract

We introduce latent space light probes for fast rendering of high albedo anisotropic materials with multiple scattering. Our Faster RPNN model improves the performance of cloud rendering by precomputing some parts of the neural architecture, separating the parts that should be inferred at runtime. The model provides 2-3x speedup over state of the art Radiance-Predicting Neural Networks (RPNN), has negligible precomputation cost and low memory footprint, while providing results with low bias that are visually indistinguishable from computationally intensive path tracing.