Click here to flash read.
2D texture maps and 3D voxel arrays are widely used to add rich detail to the
surfaces and volumes of rendered scenes, and filtered texture lookups are
integral to producing high-quality imagery. We show that filtering textures
after evaluating lighting, rather than before BSDF evaluation as is current
practice, gives a more accurate solution to the rendering equation. These
benefits are not merely theoretical, but are apparent in common cases. We
further show that stochastically sampling texture filters is crucial for
enabling this approach, which has not been possible previously except in
limited cases. Stochastic texture filtering offers additional benefits,
including efficient implementation of high-quality texture filters and
efficient filtering of textures stored in compressed and sparse data
structures, including neural representations. We demonstrate applications in
both real-time and offline rendering and show that the additional stochastic
error is minimal. Furthermore, this error is handled well by either
spatiotemporal denoising or moderate pixel sampling rates.
