A Generalizable Light Transport 3D Embedding for Global Illumination

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Xu, Bing, T, Mukund Varma, Wang, Cheng, Li, Tzumao, Wu, Lifan, Wronski, Bartlomiej, Ramamoorthi, Ravi, Salvi, Marco
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Xu, Bing
T, Mukund Varma
Wang, Cheng
Li, Tzumao
Wu, Lifan
Wronski, Bartlomiej
Ramamoorthi, Ravi
Salvi, Marco
author_facet Xu, Bing
T, Mukund Varma
Wang, Cheng
Li, Tzumao
Wu, Lifan
Wronski, Bartlomiej
Ramamoorthi, Ravi
Salvi, Marco
contents Global illumination (GI) is essential for realistic rendering but remains computationally expensive due to the complexity of simulating indirect light transport. Recent neural methods have mainly relied on per-scene optimization, sometimes extended to handle changes in camera or geometry. Efforts toward cross-scene generalization have largely stayed in 2D screen space, such as neural denoising or G-buffer based GI prediction, which often suffer from view inconsistency and limited spatial understanding. We propose a generalizable 3D light transport embedding that approximates global illumination directly from 3D scene configurations, without using rasterized or path-traced cues. Each scene is represented as a point cloud with geometric and material features. A scalable transformer models global point-to-point interactions to encode these features into neural primitives. At render time, each query point retrieves nearby primitives via nearest-neighbor search and aggregates their latent features through cross-attention to predict the desired rendering quantity. We demonstrate results on diffuse global illumination prediction across diverse indoor scenes with varying layouts, geometry, and materials. The embedding trained for irradiance estimation can be quickly adapted to new rendering tasks with limited fine-tuning. We also present preliminary results for spatial-directional radiance field estimation for glossy materials and show how the normalized field can accelerate unbiased path guiding. This approach highlights a path toward integrating learned priors into rendering pipelines without explicit ray-traced illumination cues.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_18189
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Generalizable Light Transport 3D Embedding for Global Illumination
Xu, Bing
T, Mukund Varma
Wang, Cheng
Li, Tzumao
Wu, Lifan
Wronski, Bartlomiej
Ramamoorthi, Ravi
Salvi, Marco
Graphics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Global illumination (GI) is essential for realistic rendering but remains computationally expensive due to the complexity of simulating indirect light transport. Recent neural methods have mainly relied on per-scene optimization, sometimes extended to handle changes in camera or geometry. Efforts toward cross-scene generalization have largely stayed in 2D screen space, such as neural denoising or G-buffer based GI prediction, which often suffer from view inconsistency and limited spatial understanding. We propose a generalizable 3D light transport embedding that approximates global illumination directly from 3D scene configurations, without using rasterized or path-traced cues. Each scene is represented as a point cloud with geometric and material features. A scalable transformer models global point-to-point interactions to encode these features into neural primitives. At render time, each query point retrieves nearby primitives via nearest-neighbor search and aggregates their latent features through cross-attention to predict the desired rendering quantity. We demonstrate results on diffuse global illumination prediction across diverse indoor scenes with varying layouts, geometry, and materials. The embedding trained for irradiance estimation can be quickly adapted to new rendering tasks with limited fine-tuning. We also present preliminary results for spatial-directional radiance field estimation for glossy materials and show how the normalized field can accelerate unbiased path guiding. This approach highlights a path toward integrating learned priors into rendering pipelines without explicit ray-traced illumination cues.
title A Generalizable Light Transport 3D Embedding for Global Illumination
topic Graphics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18189