The importance of importance

This week has been mostly under-the-hood stuff, so no shiny new features. I've changed the way I'm parsing object transforms as well as the way I manage space transforms during rendering. I also reduced the algorithmic complexity of importance sampling texture maps as per the 2010 Siggraph course on importance sampling, resulting in significant speedups for drawing samples from Infinite Area Lights with large environment maps compared to my previous, naive implementation. It's still pretty memory hungry - as I'm storing a pdf value per pixel - but I believe I've seen a couple of papers using various other means of drawing samples by dividing the map into regions, so I'll be taking a look at those at some point.

Render of the week:
-Just over 1 mill polys, two area lights and an infinite area light with a texture map, 1k resolution at about 4k samples per pixel