Visualization of Non-Euclidean Spaces using Ray Tracing (original) (raw)
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GPU Ray Tracing in Non-Euclidean Spaces
Synthesis Lectures on Visual Computing, 2022
This series presents lectures on research and development in visual computing for an audience of professional developers, researchers, and advanced students. Topics of interest include computational photography, animation, visualization, special effects, game design, image techniques, computational geometry, modeling, rendering, and others of interest to the visual computing system developer or researcher.
Ray-VR: Ray Tracing Virtual Reality in Falcor
ArXiv, 2020
NVidia RTX platform has been changing and extending the possibilities for real time Computer Graphics applications. It is the first time in history that retail graphics cards have full hardware support for ray tracing primitives. It still a long way to fully understand and optimize its use and this task itself is a fertile field for scientific progression. However, another path is to explore the platform as an expansion of paradigms for other problems. For example, the integration of real time Ray Tracing and Virtual Reality can result in interesting applications for visualization of Non-Euclidean Geometry and 3D Manifolds. In this paper we present Ray-VR, a novel algorithm for real time stereo ray tracing, constructed on top of Falcor, NVidia's scientific prototyping framework.
Interactive landscape visualization using GPU ray casting
Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques in Australasia and Southeast Asia - GRAPHITE '06, 2006
This paper demonstrates the simple yet effective usage of height fields for interactive landscape visualizations using a ray casting approach implemented in the pixel shader of modern graphics cards. The rendering performance is output sensitive, i.e., it scales with the number of pixels rather than the complexity of the landscape. Given a height field of a terrain and a topographic map or similar data as input, the vegetation cover is extracted and stored on top of the height field in a preprocess, enhancing the terrain with forest canopies or other mesostructure. In addition, enhanced illumination models like shadowing and ambient occlusion can be calculated at runtime with reasonable computational cost, which greatly enhances the scene realism. Finally, including the presented technique into existing rendering systems is relatively simple, mainly consisting of data preparation and pixel shader programming.
Integration of Realtime Ray Tracing into Interactive Virtual Reality Systems
Virtual Reality & Augmented Reality in Industry, 2011
Current processors provide high performance through parallelism by integrating more and more computational cores on a single chip instead of increasing the clock rate. This is true for both the CPU (multi-core of up to 8 cores) and even more so for the GPU (many-core of up to 240 cores). GPUs are still being programmed in vendor specific languages (like Nvidia's CUDA) but cross-vendor initiatives like OpenCL will allow for providing performance on a standard desktop PC that was previously only possible on supercomputers. With is upcoming Larrabee processor, Intel goes one step further and tries to combine the concepts and advantages of multi-core CPUs with that of many-core GPUs. It moves the entire rendering process into software providing more flexibility to realtime graphics applications like games or visualization applications. In this paper we present a highly parallel System consisting of the completely new Realtime Ray Tracing engine "RTfact" and the Realtime Scene Graph "RTSG" that allow making good use of modern parallel hardware. RTfact accelerates rendering via ray tracing to the point where it can be used for interactive Virtual reality applications, while RTSG allows for flexible and high-level descriptions of 3D environments on the basis of the X3D standard that enable the description of 3D objects and their behavior. RTSG is thus the interface between Virtual Reality systems and a number of different rendering modules that includes ray tracing as well as fast rasterization via the OGRE library. RTSG currently is the fastest X3D browser that optimally supports construction and design decisions through high image quality, exceptional visual realism, as well as the high degree of detail in scenes.
Global illumination of non-Euclidean spaces
Computers & Graphics, 2020
This paper presents a novel path tracer algorithm for immersive visualization of Riemannian manifolds. To do this, we introduce Riemannian illumination, a generalization of classical Computer Graphics illumination models. In this context, global light transport is expressed by extending the rendering equation to Riemannian manifolds. Using Monte Carlo integration to solve this equation results in the novel path tracer for Non-Euclidean spaces. We discuss its basic principles, as well as the general CPU algorithm. Additionally, we discuss in detail how to implement a GPU version, using the RTX pipeline. Finally, we apply the algorithm to render "photorealistic" inside views of the flat torus, Poincaré sphere, and the hyperbolic mirrored dodecahedron. These are examples of Euclidean, spherical, and hyperbolic spaces: the Thurston classical geometries.
Specialized Computer Systems for Environment Visualization
3D Research, 2018
The need for real time image generation of landscapes arises in various fields as part of tasks solved by virtual and augmented reality systems, as well as geographic information systems. Such systems provide opportunities for collecting, storing, analyzing and graphically visualizing geographic data. Algorithmic and hardware software tools for increasing the realism and efficiency of the environment visualization in 3D visualization systems are proposed. This paper discusses a modified path tracing algorithm with a two-level hierarchy of bounding volumes and finding intersections with Axis-Aligned Bounding Box. The proposed algorithm eliminates the branching and hence makes the algorithm more suitable to be implemented on the multi-threaded CPU and GPU. A modified ROAM algorithm is used to solve the qualitative visualization of reliefs' problems and landscapes. The algorithm is implemented on parallel Keywords Image synthesis Á Visualization Á Ray tracing Á Accelerating technology Á AABB Á Simulated environment Á ROAM Á Computer cluster Á GPU Á 3D pseudo stereo
The Future of Virtual Globes The Interactive Ray-Traced Digital Earth
In the past ten years graphics cards have been drastically improved. Being pushed by the multi-billion dollar computer game industry the capabilities and performance of graphics processors (GPUs) increased to support more and more geometric complexity and visual beauty in games. Today, virtual globes use similar techniques known from 3d-game programming, even though virtual globes use much more image data – which can be in the Petabyte range. Despite these architectural differences virtual globes are – like games -relying on a fast graphics card to maintain a high frame rate of 60 and more images per second at a high screen resolution.In the past decade there has also been an increase in CPU performance. With the advent of multi-core CPUs and algorithmic improvements it is now possible to reach acceptable interactive frame rates in ray-tracing using high-end multi-core PCs.Ray-tracing calculates an image by simulating the correct transport of light, obeying optical laws and energy c...
In this paper I present a way to implement Whitted style ("classic") recursive ray tracing on current generation consumer level GPUs using the OpenGL Shading Language (GLSL) and the Direct3D High Level Shading Language (HLSL). Ray tracing is implemented using a simplified, abstracted stream programming model for the GPU, written in C++.
Efficient Use of In-Game Ray-Tracing Techniques
Figure 1: Stages of our hybrid ray-tracing implementation. (a) shows a visual representation of primary rays intersections, (b) shows only the visible pixels of ray-traced objects. (c) shows the Sponza scene rasterized using a simple directional light by the using of the traditional graphics pipeline. Finally, (d) shows the final scene representation obtained by merging images (b) and (c). The Sponza scene has 44.404 vertices and 67.462 triangles. The Stanford Bunny has 34.834 vertices and 69.451 triangles. The complete scene has 114.072 vertices and 206.364 triangles. The total number of valid rays is 66.252 rendered at 10 frames per second.