Realtime Ray Tracing for Advanced Visualization in the Aerospace Industry

One of the most pervasive problems in large-scale engineering projects is the difficulty in realistically visualizing models for evaluating the design and its visual appearance. The prohibitively high investment of using physical mockups has led to pre-assembly being performed almost entirely digital. Unfortunately, the vast complexity of full CAD datasets and the required realism can not be handled by available high-end graphics hardware. In this article we present a ray tracing based software system running on a scalable shared-memory architecture that allows for interactive high-quality visualization and evaluation of huge CAD models. Special features like cutting planes, model interrogation, sophisticated shading, lighting simulation previews, and collaborative remote visualization are also supported. The capabilities of our framework will be demonstrated using several practical examples from the collaborative design review of a Boeing 777 plus lighting visualization and evaluation of industrial design concepts from EADS.