US Patent 11367244 Generating scenes containing shadows using pixel noise reduction techniques

The disclosure presents a technique for utilizing ray tracing to produce high quality visual scenes with shadows while minimizing computing costs. The disclosed technique can lower the number of rays needed for shadow region rendering and still maintain a targeted visual quality for the scene. In one example, a method for denoising a ray traced scene is disclosed that includes: (1) applying a pixel mask to a data structure of data from the scene, wherein the applying uses the scene at full resolution and pixels at the edge of a depth boundary change are identified using the pixel mask, (2) generating a penumbra mask using the data structure, (3) adjusting HitT values in the packed data buffer utilizing the penumbra mask, and (4) denoising the scene by reducing scene noise in the data of the data structure with adjusted HitT values.