Neural Point Catacaustics for Novel-View Synthesis of Reflections

View-dependent effects such as reflections pose a substantial challenge for image-based and neural rendering algorithms. Above all, curved reflectors are particularly hard, as they lead to highly non-linear reflection flows as the camera moves. We introduce a new point-based representation to compute Neural Point Catacaustics allowing novel-view synthesis of scenes with curved reflectors, from a set of casually-captured input photos. At the core of our method is a neural warp field that models catacaustic trajectories of reflections, so complex specular effects can be rendered using efficient point splatting in conjunction with a neural renderer. One of our key contributions is the explicit representation of reflections with a reflection point cloud which is displaced by the neural warp field, and a primary point cloud which is optimized to represent the rest of the scene. After a short manual annotation step, our approach allows interactive high-quality renderings of novel views with accurate reflection flow. Additionally, the explicit representation of reflection flow supports several forms of scene manipulation in captured scenes, such as reflection editing, cloning of specular objects, reflection tracking across views, and comfortable stereo viewing. We provide the source code and other supplemental material on https://repo-sam.inria.fr/ fungraph/neural_catacaustics/

Deep scene-scale material estimation from multi-view indoor captures

The movie and video game industries have adopted photogrammetry as a way to create digital 3D assets from multiple photographs of a real-world scene. But photogrammetry algorithms typically output an RGB texture atlas of the scene that only serves as visual guidance for skilled artists to create material maps suitable for physically-based rendering. We present a learning-based approach that automatically produces digital assets ready for physically-based rendering, by estimating approximate material maps from multi-view captures of indoor scenes that are used with retopologized geometry. We base our approach on a material estimation Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) that we execute on each input image. We leverage the view-dependent visual cues provided by the multiple observations of the scene by gathering, for each pixel of a given image, the color of the corresponding point in other images. This image-space CNN provides us with an ensemble of predictions, which we merge in texture space as the last step of our approach. Our results demonstrate that the recovered assets can be directly used for physically-based rendering and editing of real indoor scenes from any viewpoint and novel lighting. Our method generates approximate material maps in a fraction of time compared to the closest previous solutions.

Neural BRDF Representation and Importance Sampling

Controlled capture of real-world material appearance yields tabulated sets of highly realistic reflectance data. In practice, however, its high memory footprint requires compressing into a representation that can be used efficiently in rendering while remaining faithful to the original. Previous works in appearance encoding often prioritised one of these requirements at the expense of the other, by either applying high-fidelity array compression strategies not suited for efficient queries during rendering, or by fitting a compact analytic model that lacks expressiveness. We present a compact neural network-based representation of BRDF data that combines high-accuracy reconstruction with efficient practical rendering via built-in interpolation of reflectance. We encode BRDFs as lightweight networks, and propose a training scheme with adaptive angular sampling, critical for the accurate reconstruction of specular highlights. Additionally, we propose a novel approach to make our representation amenable to importance sampling: rather than inverting the trained networks, we learn an embedding that can be mapped to parameters of an analytic BRDF for which importance sampling is known. We evaluate encoding results on isotropic and anisotropic BRDFs from multiple real-world datasets, and importance sampling performance for isotropic BRDFs mapped to two different analytic models.