Volumetric Path-tracer illuminated by million lights in CUDA

Demo Videos

1. 100,000 Lights:
   Rendering volumetric explosion illuminated by 100,000 point lights using GPU-parallel sampling.
   

2. 500 Lights (Baseline):
   Same scene with only 500 lights to demonstrate the visual difference and performance baseline.
   

3. Light Point Visualization:
   Point lights shown as emissive spheres without volume scattering to visualize spatial distribution.
   

A high-performance volumetric path-tracer implemented in CUDA C++ for rendering realistic explosions and volumetric effects. This renderer is capable of handling millions of light sources efficiently through GPU acceleration.

Features

• Volumetric path tracing for realistic smoke and explosion rendering
• Support for OpenVDB data format
• Efficient handling of millions of light sources
• GPU-accelerated rendering using CUDA
• High-quality volumetric scattering and absorption

Requirements

• CUDA 11.8
• GCC 10.1.0
• OpenVDB library
• Conda environment with the following packages:
  • boost
  • tbb
  • blosc

Installation

1. Set up your conda environment:

conda create -n graphics python=3.8
conda activate graphics
conda install -c conda-forge boost tbb blosc

2. Install OpenVDB:

conda install -c conda-forge openvdb

Building

Compile the renderer using the following command:

nvcc -std=c++17 main.cu src/vdb_reader.cu -o render \
     -I$CONDA_PREFIX/include -L$CONDA_PREFIX/lib \
     -Xlinker -rpath -Xlinker $CONDA_PREFIX/lib \
     -lopenvdb -ltbb -lblosc -lboost_system -lboost_iostreams -lboost_filesystem -w

Running

1. Set up the required environment variables:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$CONDA_PREFIX/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
export LD_PRELOAD=$CONDA_PREFIX/lib/libstdc++.so.6

2. Run the renderer with a VDB file:

./render path/to/your/file.vdb

Project Structure

• main.cu: Main CUDA implementation
• src/vdb_reader.cu: OpenVDB data loading and processing
• v1/: Directory containing VDB files for rendering