Occlusion-Point Reuse for Ray-Traced Ambient Occlusion and Shadow
Authors: Haojie Jin, Fujia Su, Zehui Lin, Chenxiao Hu, Jierui Ren, Yuqing Yuan, Yanchen Zhang, Zhongtao Wang, +4 more
Organizations: Peking University, China · Central Media Technology Institution, Huawei, China
Abstract
Ambient occlusion (AO) and soft shadows are critical visibility cues for spatial perception in real-time rendering. Hardware ray tracing provides a direct way to evaluate these effects, enabling ray-traced AO and area-light shadows that avoid many limitations of screen-space AO and shadow mapping. However, real-time budgets allow only a few rays per pixel, leaving raw ray-traced estimates noisy and expensive. We present an occlusion-point reuse framework that reuses traced samples in the domain of first-hit occlusion points instead of directly reusing final shading values or light samples. This provides a ray-reuse formulation for AO, rather than merely filtering or reusing completed AO values. The key idea is to transform AO and area-light shadow estimators into occluder-domain integrals, then combine neighboring occluder samples with a multiple-importance-sampling (MIS) formulation. For both AO and shadows, we derive unbiased estimators that validate convergence to the transformed integrals, as well as biased estimators designed for practical real-time execution. The biased variants assume local first-hit occluder consistency; for shadows, this occluder-based assumption better matches local visibility geometry than the visibility-consistency assumption commonly used when reusing light samples. Experiments show higher AO and shadow quality than non-reuse ray-traced baselines, and better shadow quality than light-sample reuse at comparable cost.
We study the problem of physically plausible shadow casting when animating 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) avatars, either individually or in multi-avatar and object-interaction scenarios, within existing 3DGS scenes. In contrast to prior methods that rely on binary hit tests and mesh-based shadow casters, our method performs shadow computation entirely in Gaussian space, without requiring any mesh reconstruction. We introduce RAGA, a Ray-Traced Gaussian Shadow Casting formulation based on exact ray-Gaussian line integrals. For each occluding Gaussian, we integrate the opacity profile along the shadow ray and normalize by the theoretical maximum integral, producing a weight that captures how the ray traverses the occluder rather than merely whether an intersection occurred. To reduce temporal variance from clothing deformations in animated avatars, we further introduce an avatar proxy representation that stabilizes shadow casting while preserving visual fidelity. We implement RAGA using custom CUDA kernels integrated with the NVIDIA OptiX framework; as such, our shadow tracer runs at rates of about 50 FPS. We evaluate on single-avatar, multi-avatar, and avatar-object interaction scenarios across multiple datasets, demonstrating substantially improved shadow realism, temporal stability, and scene coherence. Our project page is available at https://miraymen.github.io/raga/.
Camera-only 3D semantic occupancy prediction aims to infer voxel-wise scene semantics from multi-view images, yet remains fundamentally challenging due to depth ambiguity and occlusion. Along a single camera ray, multiple spatially separated surfaces may coexist, making occupancy inherently a multi-label existence problem rather than a single-depth estimation task. However, most existing approaches favor a single dominant depth hypothesis per ray, limiting their ability to model volumetric scenes under complex occlusion. To address this limitation, we introduce RayOcc, an occlusion-aware ray occupancy framework that reformulates ray modeling as multi-label existence prediction. Instead of predicting a categorical depth distribution, RayOcc estimates a non-normalized Gaussian mixture intensity along each ray and converts it into interval-wise occupancy probabilities via a Poisson event formulation, allowing multiple occupied hypotheses to coexist without enforcing mutual competition across depth. The predicted mixture components are interpreted as occupancy hypotheses to initialize sparse 3D Gaussian primitives, which are refined and rasterized for semantic occupancy prediction. Experiments on the nuScenes benchmark show that RayOcc achieves state-of-the-art overall IoU and mIoU among the compared Gaussian-based occupancy methods.
We introduce a differentiable 3D representation that unifies the ray tracing capabilities of foam-based ray tracing with the efficiency of modern rasterization pipelines. While prior foam representations enable constant-time ray traversal through an explicit volumetric partition of space, their potentially unbounded cells hinder efficient tile-based rasterization. We address this limitation by generalizing Voronoi foams to bounded power diagrams with controllable cell extents, enabling spatially bounded primitives without requiring expensive Delaunay triangulations during training. We further introduce an oriented surface formulation that explicitly models interfaces between interior and exterior regions, and decouple geometry from appearance by embedding differentiable texture directly on these surfaces. Together, these contributions yield a representation that preserves state-of-the-art ray tracing efficiency while achieving rasterization performance competitive with current generation 3DGS, providing a practical path toward unified real-time differentiable rendering.
Shrisudhan Govindarajan, Daniel Rebain, Dor Verbin +3