Rendering Large Scenes Using Parallel Ray Tracing

Ray tracing is a powerful technique to generate realistic images of 3D scenes. However, the rendering of complex scenes may easily exceed the processing and memory capabilities of a single workstation. Distributed processing offers a solution if the algorithm can be parallelised in an efficient way. In this paper a hybrid scheduling approach is presented that combines demand driven and data parallel techniques. Which tasks to process demand driven and which data driven, is decided by the data intensity of the task and the amount of data locality (coherence) that will be present in the task. By combining demand driven and data driven tasks, a good load balance is achieved, while at the same time spreading the communication evenly across the network. This leads to a scalable and efficient parallel implementation of the ray tracing algorithm with fairly no restriction on the size of the model data base to be rendered.