Soon after showcasing his recent rendering results which left industry veterans impressed and causing many of us to start documenting ourselves about ReSTIR, professional madman Tomasz Stachowiak showed a new demonstration of the global illumination capabilities of his pet project.

But more importantly, he took the time to describe the techniques used to get such results. The writing is fairly high level, and assumes the reader to be familiar with several advanced topics, but it comes with clear illustrations at least for some parts. It also mentions the various ways in which ReSTIR is leveraged to support the techniques used. Finally, it doesn’t try to hide the parts where the techniques fall short, quite the opposite.

The article: Global Illumination overview.

In very brief, the rendering combines a geometry pass, from which a ReSTIR pass is done to compute the first bounce rays, in combination with a sparse voxel grid based irradiance cache for the rest of the light paths, which also relies on ReSTIR, and a few clever tricks to handle various corner cases, as well as denoising and temporal anti-aliasing to smooth things out.