We propose two novel ideas (adoption of deferred rendering and mesh-based representation) to improve the quality of 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) based inverse rendering. We first report a problem incurred by hidden Gaussians, where Gaussians beneath the surface adversely affect the pixel color in the volume rendering adopted by the existing methods. In order to resolve the problem, we propose applying deferred rendering and report new problems incurred in a naive application of deferred rendering to the existing 3DGS-based inverse rendering. In an effort to improve the quality of 3DGS-based inverse rendering under deferred rendering, we propose a novel two-step training approach which (1) exploits mesh extraction and utilizes a hybrid mesh-3DGS representation and (2) applies novel regularization methods to better exploit the mesh. Our experiments show that, under relighting, the proposed method offers significantly better rendering quality than the existing 3DGS-based inverse rendering methods. Compared with the SOTA voxel grid-based inverse rendering method, it gives better rendering quality while offering real-time rendering.
Recent advancements in neural rendering technologies and their supporting devices have paved the way for immersive 3D experiences, significantly transforming human interaction with intelligent devices across diverse applications. However, achieving the desired real-time rendering speeds for immersive interactions is still hindered by (1) the lack of a universal algorithmic solution for different application scenarios and (2) the dedication of existing devices or accelerators to merely specific rendering pipelines. To overcome this challenge, we have developed a unified neural rendering accelerator that caters to a wide array of typical neural rendering pipelines, enabling real-time and on-device rendering across different applications while maintaining both efficiency and compatibility. Our accelerator design is based on the insight that, although neural rendering pipelines vary and their algorithm designs are continually evolving, they typically share common operators, predominantly executing similar workloads. Building on this insight, we propose a reconfigurable hardware architecture that can dynamically adjust dataflow to align with specific rendering metric requirements for di
The landscape of computer graphics has undergone significant transformations with the recent advances of differentiable rendering models. These rendering models often rely on heuristic designs that may not fully align with the final rendering objectives. We address this gap by pioneering \textit{evolutive rendering models}, a methodology where rendering models possess the ability to evolve and adapt dynamically throughout the rendering process. In particular, we present a comprehensive learning framework that enables the optimization of three principal rendering elements, including the gauge transformations, the ray sampling mechanisms, and the primitive organization. Central to this framework is the development of differentiable versions of these rendering elements, allowing for effective gradient backpropagation from the final rendering objectives. A detailed analysis of gradient characteristics is performed to facilitate a stable and goal-oriented elements evolution. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the large potential of evolutive rendering models for enhancing the rendering performance across various domains, including static and dynamic scene representations, generative
Rendering for light field displays (LFDs) requires rendering of dozens or hundreds of views, which must then be combined into a single image on the display, making real-time LFD rendering extremely difficult. We introduce light field display point rendering (LFDPR), which meets these challenges by improving eye-based point rendering [Gavane and Watson 2023] with texture-based splatting, which avoids oversampling of triangles mapped to only a few texels; and with LFD-biased sampling, which adjusts horizontal and vertical triangle sampling to match the sampling of the LFD itself. To improve image quality, we introduce multiview mipmapping, which reduces texture aliasing even though compute shaders do not support hardware mipmapping. We also introduce angular supersampling and reconstruction to combat LFD view aliasing and crosstalk. The resulting LFDPR is 2-8x times faster than multiview rendering, with similar comparable quality.
Physics-based differentiable rendering has emerged as a powerful technique in computer graphics and vision, with a broad range of applications in solving inverse rendering tasks. At its core, differentiable rendering enables the computation of gradients with respect to scene parameters, allowing optimization-based approaches to solve various problems. Over the past few years, significant advancements have been made in both the underlying theory and the practical implementations of differentiable rendering algorithms. In this report, we provide a comprehensive overview of the current state of the art in physics-based differentiable rendering, focusing on recent advances in general differentiable rendering theory, Monte Carlo sampling strategy, and computational efficiency.
Point-Based Neural Rendering (PBNR) is emerging as a promising class of rendering techniques, which are permeating all aspects of society, driven by a growing demand for real-time, photorealistic rendering in AR/VR and digital twins. Achieving real-time PBNR on mobile devices is challenging. This paper proposes MetaSapiens, a PBNR system that for the first time delivers real-time neural rendering on mobile devices while maintaining human visual quality. MetaSapiens combines three techniques. First, we present an efficiency-aware pruning technique to optimize rendering speed. Second, we introduce a Foveated Rendering (FR) method for PBNR, leveraging humans' low visual acuity in peripheral regions to relax rendering quality and improve rendering speed. Finally, we propose an accelerator design for FR, addressing the load imbalance issue in (FR-based) PBNR. Our evaluation shows that our system achieves an order of magnitude speedup over existing PBNR models without sacrificing subjective visual quality, as confirmed by a user study. The code and demo are available at: https://horizon-lab.org/metasapiens/.
Reconstructing a renderable 3D model from images is a useful but challenging task. Recent feedforward 3D reconstruction methods have demonstrated remarkable success in efficiently recovering geometry, but still cannot accurately model the complex appearances of these 3D reconstructed models. Recent diffusion-based generative models can synthesize realistic images or videos of an object using reference images without explicitly modeling its appearance, which provides a promising direction for object rendering, but lacks accurate control over the viewpoints. In this paper, we propose GO-Renderer, a unified framework integrating the reconstructed 3D proxies to guide the video generative models to achieve high-quality object rendering on arbitrary viewpoints under arbitrary lighting conditions. Our method not only enjoys the accurate viewpoint control using the reconstructed 3D proxy but also enables high-quality rendering in different lighting environments using diffusion generative models without explicitly modeling complex materials and lighting. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GO-Renderer achieves state-of-the-art performance across the object rendering tasks, including synt
Differentiable rendering is a technique that aims to invert the rendering process to enable optimizing rendering parameters from a set of images. In this article, we present a differentiable volume rendering solution called DiffTetVR for tetrahedral meshes. Unlike previous works based on regular grids, this enables the optimization of vertex positions and the local subdivision of the mesh without relying on multigrid methods. We present an efficient implementation of the forward rendering process, deduce the derivatives for the backwards pass and regularization terms for avoiding degenerate tetrahedra, and finally show how the tetrahedral mesh can be subdivided locally to enable a coarse-to-fine optimization process. The source code is made publicly available on GitHub at https://github.com/chrismile/DiffTetVR.
3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) combines classic image-based rendering, pointbased graphics, and modern differentiable techniques, and offers an interesting alternative to traditional physically-based rendering. 3DGS-family models are far from efficient for power-constrained Extended Reality (XR) devices, which need to operate at a Watt-level. This paper introduces PowerGS, the first framework to jointly minimize the rendering and display power in 3DGS under a quality constraint. We present a general problem formulation and show that solving the problem amounts to 1) identifying the iso-quality curve(s) in the landscape subtended by the display and rendering power and 2) identifying the power-minimal point on a given curve, which has a closed-form solution given a proper parameterization of the curves. PowerGS also readily supports foveated rendering for further power savings. Extensive experiments and user studies show that PowerGS achieves up to 86% total power reduction compared to state-of-the-art 3DGS models, with minimal loss in both subjective and objective quality. Code is available at https://github.com/horizon-research/PowerGS.
Non-Photorealistic Rendering (NPR) has long been used to create artistic visualizations that prioritize style over realism, enabling the depiction of a wide range of aesthetic effects, from hand-drawn sketches to painterly renderings. While classical NPR methods, such as edge detection, toon shading, and geometric abstraction, have been well-established in both research and practice, with a particular focus on stroke-based rendering, the recent rise of deep learning represents a paradigm shift. We analyze the similarities and differences between classical and neural network based NPR techniques, focusing on stroke-based rendering (SBR), highlighting their strengths and limitations. We discuss trade offs in quality and artistic control between these paradigms, propose a framework where these approaches can be combined for new possibilities in expressive rendering.
Neural rendering is a new image and video generation method based on deep learning. It combines the deep learning model with the physical knowledge of computer graphics, to obtain a controllable and realistic scene model, and realize the control of scene attributes such as lighting, camera parameters, posture and so on. On the one hand, neural rendering can not only make full use of the advantages of deep learning to accelerate the traditional forward rendering process, but also provide new solutions for specific tasks such as inverse rendering and 3D reconstruction. On the other hand, the design of innovative hardware structures that adapt to the neural rendering pipeline breaks through the parallel computing and power consumption bottleneck of existing graphics processors, which is expected to provide important support for future key areas such as virtual and augmented reality, film and television creation and digital entertainment, artificial intelligence and the metaverse. In this paper, we review the technical connotation, main challenges, and research progress of neural rendering. On this basis, we analyze the common requirements of neural rendering pipeline for hardware acce
We propose an adaptive form of frameless rendering with the potential to dramatically increase rendering speed over conventional interactive rendering approaches. Without the rigid sampling patterns of framed renderers, sampling and reconstruction can adapt with very fine granularity to spatio-temporal color change. A sampler uses closed-loop feedback to guide sampling toward edges or motion in the image. Temporally deep buffers store all the samples created over a short time interval for use in reconstruction and as sampler feedback. GPU-based reconstruction responds both to sampling density and space-time color gradients. Where the displayed scene is static, spatial color change dominates and older samples are given significant weight in reconstruction, resulting in sharper and eventually antialiased images. Where the scene is dynamic, more recent samples are emphasized, resulting in less sharp but more up-to-date images. We also use sample reprojection to improve reconstruction and guide sampling toward occlusion edges, undersampled regions, and specular highlights. In simulation our frameless renderer requires an order of magnitude fewer samples than traditional rendering of si
Realistic human-centric rendering plays a key role in both computer vision and computer graphics. Rapid progress has been made in the algorithm aspect over the years, yet existing human-centric rendering datasets and benchmarks are rather impoverished in terms of diversity, which are crucial for rendering effect. Researchers are usually constrained to explore and evaluate a small set of rendering problems on current datasets, while real-world applications require methods to be robust across different scenarios. In this work, we present DNA-Rendering, a large-scale, high-fidelity repository of human performance data for neural actor rendering. DNA-Rendering presents several alluring attributes. First, our dataset contains over 1500 human subjects, 5000 motion sequences, and 67.5M frames' data volume. Second, we provide rich assets for each subject -- 2D/3D human body keypoints, foreground masks, SMPLX models, cloth/accessory materials, multi-view images, and videos. These assets boost the current method's accuracy on downstream rendering tasks. Third, we construct a professional multi-view system to capture data, which contains 60 synchronous cameras with max 4096 x 3000 resolution,
3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has demonstrated impressive Novel View Synthesis (NVS) results in a real-time rendering manner. During training, it relies heavily on the average magnitude of view-space positional gradients to grow Gaussians to reduce rendering loss. However, this average operation smooths the positional gradients from different viewpoints and rendering errors from different pixels, hindering the growth and optimization of many defective Gaussians. This leads to strong spurious artifacts in some areas. To address this problem, we propose Hard Gaussian Splatting, dubbed HGS, which considers multi-view significant positional gradients and rendering errors to grow hard Gaussians that fill the gaps of classical Gaussian Splatting on 3D scenes, thus achieving superior NVS results. In detail, we present positional gradient driven HGS, which leverages multi-view significant positional gradients to uncover hard Gaussians. Moreover, we propose rendering error guided HGS, which identifies noticeable pixel rendering errors and potentially over-large Gaussians to jointly mine hard Gaussians. By growing and optimizing these hard Gaussians, our method helps to resolve blurring and n
We present differentiable point-based inverse rendering, DPIR, an analysis-by-synthesis method that processes images captured under diverse illuminations to estimate shape and spatially-varying BRDF. To this end, we adopt point-based rendering, eliminating the need for multiple samplings per ray, typical of volumetric rendering, thus significantly enhancing the speed of inverse rendering. To realize this idea, we devise a hybrid point-volumetric representation for geometry and a regularized basis-BRDF representation for reflectance. The hybrid geometric representation enables fast rendering through point-based splatting while retaining the geometric details and stability inherent to SDF-based representations. The regularized basis-BRDF mitigates the ill-posedness of inverse rendering stemming from limited light-view angular samples. We also propose an efficient shadow detection method using point-based shadow map rendering. Our extensive evaluations demonstrate that DPIR outperforms prior works in terms of reconstruction accuracy, computational efficiency, and memory footprint. Furthermore, our explicit point-based representation and rendering enables intuitive geometry and reflect
Reconstructing physics-based 3D assets -- geometry, materials, and illumination -- from multi-view images is a core problem in computer graphics and vision, and a prerequisite for realistic relighting and editing. Physics-based inverse rendering offers an accurate image-formation model, but is severely underconstrained: without strong priors, illumination is baked into materials, and reconstructions generalize poorly to novel views and lighting. Data-driven diffusion models, in contrast, predict visually plausible materials, yet their predictions rarely satisfy the rendering equation and are not directly usable for physics-based rendering. We bridge these two paradigms rather than replacing either. Our key idea is to treat the predictions of a state-of-the-art diffusion model not as target material values but as a similarity kernel for optimization: we introduce a regularization loss that penalizes deviations in the optimized material over surface regions where the diffusion predictions are near-constant, while leaving the optimization free to match the input images. Built on this regularizer, our end-to-end pipeline jointly reconstructs geometry, materials, and illumination, yield
Haptic rendering of viscoelastic materials that exhibit creep and stress relaxation is crucial for many applications, such as medical training with realistic biological tissue models. Fractional-order viscoelastic models provide an effective means of describing intrinsically time-dependent dynamics with few parameters, as these models can naturally capture memory effects. In this study, we present analyses of passivity and rendering performance for fractional-order viscoelastic models under finite-memory discretization. We derive closed-form expressions to ensure the passivity of haptic rendering with a fractional-order (FO) standard linear solid (SLS) model based on Grunwald-Letnikov derivative under short-memory discretization. We also provide symbolic expressions for the effective stiffness and damping of such FO-SLS models. The resulting passivity conditions constitute a unified framework that generalizes previously reported results for integer-order Kelvin-Voigt, Maxwell, and SLS models, since these results are special cases of the newly derived condition. Furthermore, we provide experimental validations of the theoretical passivity bounds and human-subject evaluations of perc
Classically, rasterization techniques are performed for real-time rendering to meet the constraint of interactive frame rates. However, such techniques do not produce realistic results as compared to ray tracing approaches. Hence, hybrid rendering has emerged to improve the graphics fidelity of rasterization with ray tracing in real-time. We explore the approach of distributed rendering in incorporating real-time hybrid rendering into metaverse experiences for immersive graphics. In standalone extended reality (XR) devices, such ray tracing-enabled graphics is only feasible through pure cloud-based remote rendering systems that rely on low-latency networks to transmit real-time ray-traced data in response to interactive user input. Under high network latency conditions, remote rendering might not be able to maintain interactive frame rates for the client, adversely affecting the user experience. We adopt hybrid rendering via a distributed rendering approach by integrating ray tracing on powerful remote hardware with raster-based rendering on user access devices. With this hybrid approach, our technique can help standalone XR devices achieve ray tracing-incorporated graphics and mai
We present a simple algorithm for differentiable rendering of surfaces represented by Signed Distance Fields (SDF), which makes it easy to integrate rendering into gradient-based optimization pipelines. To tackle visibility-related derivatives that make rendering non-differentiable, existing physically based differentiable rendering methods often rely on elaborate guiding data structures or reparameterization with a global impact on variance. In this article, we investigate an alternative that embraces nonzero bias in exchange for low variance and architectural simplicity. Our method expands the lower-dimensional boundary integral into a thin band that is easy to sample when the underlying surface is represented by an SDF. We demonstrate the performance and robustness of our formulation in end-to-end inverse rendering tasks, where it obtains results that are competitive with or superior to existing work.
3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has enabled high-fidelity virtualization with fast rendering and optimization for novel view synthesis. On the other hand, triangle mesh models still remain a popular choice for surface reconstruction but suffer from slow or heavy optimization in traditional mesh-based differentiable renderers. To address this problem, we propose a new lightweight differentiable mesh renderer leveraging the efficient rasterization process of 3DGS, named Gaussian Mesh Renderer (GMR), which tightly integrates the Gaussian and mesh representations. Each Gaussian primitive is analytically derived from the corresponding mesh triangle, preserving structural fidelity and enabling the gradient flow. Compared to the traditional mesh renderers, our method achieves smoother gradients, which especially contributes to better optimization using smaller batch sizes with limited memory. Our implementation is available in the public GitHub repository at https://github.com/huntorochi/Gaussian-Mesh-Renderer.