A post mortem describing the modifications made to my hobby renderer to make it capable of rendering the Disney Moana Island scene on my desktop computer.
In combination with the sampling strategies described in my earlier blog posts, the Vertex Connection and Merging technique can be used to achieve significantly faster convergence for scenes with even slightly complicated light transport paths.
By sampling the solid angle of an area light source we can see much faster convergence than is acheived by sampling the surface area of the light source.
In the second part of this series I describe the pitfalls of sampling only the GGX distribution term and then describe a newer technique for sampling the visible distribution of normals.
