An efficient spatio-temporal architecture for animation rendering

Producing high quality animations featuring rich object appearance and compelling lighting effects is very time consuming using traditional frame-by-frame rendering systems. In this paper we present a rendering architecture for computing multiple frames at once by exploiting the coherence between image samples in the temporal domain. For each sample representing a given point in the scene we update its view-dependent components for each frame and add its contribution to pixels identified through the compensation of camera and object motion. This leads naturally to a high quality motion blur and significantly reduces the cost of illumination computations. The required visibility information is provided using a custom ray tracing acceleration data structure for multiple frames simultaneously. We demonstrate that precise and costly global illumination techniques such as bidirectional path tracing become affordable in this rendering architecture.