Displacement maps and procedural displacement shaders are a widely used approach of specifying geometric detail and increasing the visual complexity of a scene. While it is relatively straightforward to handle displacement shaders in pipeline based rendering systems such as the Reyes-architecture, it is much harder to efficiently integrate displacement-mapped surfaces in ray-tracers. Many comme...

In this paper an acceleration method for finding the nearest ray–object intersection for ray tracing purposes is presented. We use the concept of BSP trees enriched by rope trees. These are used to accelerate the traversal of the BSP tree. We give a comparison of experimental results between the technique based on BSP tree and uniform spatial subdivision.

The Curves primitive defined in RenderMan is useful for modelling and rendering ribbonlike objects. This paper gives a simple framework for ray-curve intersection tests in ray tracing, and provides concrete details for one form of the primitive. The form is especially important for fine objects such as hair and fur.

The creation of ever more realistic images is central to many elds ranging from the animation industry to education, and ray tracing is one of the most popular and powerful means by which photo-realistic images can be created. In this paper, we report on porting, measuring and optimizing a ray tracer on cluster computers. We investigate (A) the impact of different hardware decisions (interconne...

PURPOSE Of all transforms of an eye, aberrations are significant when higher visual acuity is to be achieved. Ray tracing aberrometry developed by the Institute of Biomedical Engineering (Kiev) and first tested at the Vardinoyannion Eye Institute of Crete is a promising technique for eye refraction aberration and refraction mapping. METHODS The technique uses measurement of the position of a ...

Although it is generally known that ray tracing is ’time consuming’, yet rewarding with respect to image quality, there are few attempts to predict the rendering time for a given model in advance. This paper focusses on the development of such a technique. The cost of ray tracing using adaptive spatial subdivisions has been studied by analysing the probability that a ray intersects an object. P...

Point set surfaces (PSS) are a smooth manifold surface approximation from a set of sample points. The surface definition is based on a projection operation that constructs local polynomial approximations and respects a minimum feature size. We present techniques for ray tracing PSSs. For the computation of ray-surface intersection the properties of the projection operation are exploited: The su...

Although ray tracing has been successfully applied to interactively render large datasets, supersampling pixels will not be practical in interactive applications for some time. Because large datasets tend to have subpixel detail, one-sample-per-pixel ray tracing can produce visually distracting popping and scintillation. We present an algorithm that directs primary rays toward locations rendere...

Ray tracing is certainly one of the fundamental algorithms in the world of computer graphics. Given enough time, processing power, and highly detailed geometry, the algorithm can produce wonderfully realistic renderings. However, these requirements, especially the first two, can cause a number of headaches for individuals interested in creating renderings. This paper focuses on including the dy...

In ray tracing, it is standard practice to consider solely the real part of any medium’s refractive index for determining the changes in a ray’s direction at the interface between two media. Any absorption is accounted for by reducing the intensity or weight of the ray in accordance with its propagation distance. This practice is adequate at optical wavelengths where absorption is generally ver...