A Simple Approach to Differentiable Rendering of SDFs
Abstract
We present a simple algorithm for differentiable rendering of surfaces represented by Signed Distance Fields (SDF), which makes it easy to integrate rendering into gradient-based optimization pipelines. To tackle visibility-related derivatives that make rendering non-differentiable, existing physically based differentiable rendering methods often rely on elaborate guiding data structures or reparameterization with a global impact on variance. In this article, we investigate an alternative that embraces nonzero bias in exchange for low variance and architectural simplicity. Our method expands the lower-dimensional boundary integral into a thin band that is easy to sample when the underlying surface is represented by an SDF. We demonstrate the performance and robustness of our formulation in end-to-end inverse rendering tasks, where it obtains results that are competitive with or superior to existing work.
Video
Text citation
Zichen Wang, Ziyi Zhang, Wenzel Jakob, and Steve Marschner. 2024. A Simple Approach to Differentiable Rendering of SDFs. In Transactions on Graphics (Proceedings of SIGGRAPH Asia) 43(6).
BibTeX
@article{Wang24Simple, author = {Zichen Wang and Ziyi Zhang and Wenzel Jakob and Steve Marschner}, title = {A Simple Approach to Differentiable Rendering of SDFs}, journal = {Transactions on Graphics (Proceedings of SIGGRAPH Asia)}, volume = {43}, number = {6}, year = {2024}, month = nov, doi = {10.1145/3680528.3687573} }