An Interactive Information Visualization Approach to Physically-Based Rendering

Gerard Simons, Marco Ament, Sebastian Herholz, Carsten Dachsbacher, Martin Eisemann, Elmar Eisemann

Abstract: In this work, we present a novel information visualization tool to gain insight into the light transport in a physically-based rendering setting. The tool consists of a sampling-based data reduction technique, an extended interactive parallel coordinates plot providing an overview of the attributes linked to each light sample, 2D and 3D heat maps to represent different aspects of the rendering process, as well as a three-dimensional view to display and animate the light path transportation throughout the scene. We show several applications including differential light transport visualization for scene analysis, lighting and material optimization, reduction of rendering artifacts, and user-guided importance sampling.