NeuMIP: Multi-Resolution Neural Materials
This work addresses the challenge of efficiently representing and rendering intricate materials in computer graphics, offering a novel approach that improves upon traditional techniques for applications in rendering and visualization.
The authors tackled the problem of rendering complex material appearances at multiple scales, where classical methods fail, by introducing NeuMIP, a neural method that generalizes mipmapping to neural textures and enables accurate effects like parallax and self-shadowing without tessellation.
We propose NeuMIP, a neural method for representing and rendering a variety of material appearances at different scales. Classical prefiltering (mipmapping) methods work well on simple material properties such as diffuse color, but fail to generalize to normals, self-shadowing, fibers or more complex microstructures and reflectances. In this work, we generalize traditional mipmap pyramids to pyramids of neural textures, combined with a fully connected network. We also introduce neural offsets, a novel method which allows rendering materials with intricate parallax effects without any tessellation. This generalizes classical parallax mapping, but is trained without supervision by any explicit heightfield. Neural materials within our system support a 7-dimensional query, including position, incoming and outgoing direction, and the desired filter kernel size. The materials have small storage (on the order of standard mipmapping except with more texture channels), and can be integrated within common Monte-Carlo path tracing systems. We demonstrate our method on a variety of materials, resulting in complex appearance across levels of detail, with accurate parallax, self-shadowing, and other effects.