Diffusion Renderer: Neural Inverse and Forward Rendering with Video Diffusion Models

Understanding and modeling lighting effects are fundamental tasks in computer vision and graphics. Classic physically-based rendering (PBR) accurately simulates the light transport, but relies on precise scene representations--explicit 3D geometry, high-quality material properties, and lighting conditions--that are often impractical to obtain in real-world scenarios. Therefore, we introduce Diffusion Renderer, a neural approach that addresses the dual problem of inverse and forward rendering within a holistic framework. Leveraging powerful video diffusion model priors, the inverse rendering model accurately estimates G-buffers from real-world videos, providing an interface for image editing tasks, and training data for the rendering model. Conversely, our rendering model generates photorealistic images from G-buffers without explicit light transport simulation. Specifically, we first train a video diffusion model for inverse rendering on synthetic data, which generalizes well to real-world videos and allows us to auto-label diverse real-world videos. We then co-train our rendering model using both synthetic and auto-labeled real-world data. Experiments demonstrate that Diffusion Renderer effectively approximates inverse and forwards rendering, consistently outperforming the state-of-the-art. Our model enables practical applications from a single video input—including relighting, material editing, and realistic object insertion.