Implementation of Manifold Next Event Estimation for Caustics Rendering on Vulkan

Caustics rendering has been an important topic in computer graphics. It is particularly a challenging problem because of the difficulty in path tracing algorithms to handle the specular-diffuse-specular paths. Recently Manifold Next Event Estimation (MNEE) has demonstrated its efficiency for dealing with the caustics paths and has been implemented in the Mitsuba renderer on desktop computers. However, MNEE has not yet been implemented on mobile devices to our best knowledge. In this paper, we implemented the MNEE methods on Vulkan, so that it can run on both desktop computers and mobile devices.