We present a novel GPU-based method for accelerating the visibility function computation of the lighting equation in dynamic scenes composed of rigid objects. The method pre-computes, for each object in the scene, the visibility and normal information, as seen from the environment, onto the bounding sphere surrounding the object and encodes it into maps. The visibility function is encoded by a ...

Distribution ray tracing uses Monte Carlo integration to solve the rendering equation. This technique was introduced by Cook et. al, and was notable because of its simplicity and its ability to simulate areal luminaires, camera lens e ects, motion blur, and imperfect specular re ection[5]. Distribution ray tracing has been extended and modi ed by many researchers, most notably by Kajiya who add...

Recent developments have produced several techniques for interactive ray tracing of dynamic scenes. In particular, bounding volume hierarchies (BVHs) are efficient acceleration structures that handle complex triangle distributions and can accommodate deformable scenes by updating (refitting) the bounding primitive without restructuring the entire tree. Unfortunately, updating only the bounding ...

Using the GPU to accelerate ray tracing may seem like a natural decision due to the highly parallel nature of the problem. However, past attempts at a fully general GPU ray tracer have yielded poor performance compared to optimized CPU ray tracers. In this paper we instead focus on an algorithm for quick intersection of a single mesh on the GPU. The algorithm uses a threaded bounding volume hie...

In the last years, the well known ray tracing algorithm gained new popularity with the introduction of interactive ray tracing methods. The high modularity and the ability to produce highly realistic images make ray tracing an attractive alternative to raster graphics hardware. Interactive ray tracing also proved its potential in the field of Mixed Reality rendering and provides novel methods f...

Consider optical systems consisting of a set of refractive or reflective surfaces. The ray tracing problem is, given an optical system and the position and direction of an initial light ray, to decide if a light ray reaches some given final position. We assume the position and the tangent of the incident angle of the initial light ray is rational. For many years, ray tracing has been used for d...

For many decades, ray tracing is known and well used for rendering highly realistic images. Since ray tracing simulates the physical transport of light even highly complex optical properties and illumination conditions can be rendered correctly. Due to these features ray tracing is used e.g. for commercials and movies, in architecture, and for visualizations of industrial prototypes. Especially...

Ray tracing is one of the important elements in photo-realistic image synthesis. Since ray tracing is computationally expensive, a large body of research has been devoted to improve the performance of ray tracing. One of the recent developments on efficient ray tracing is the implementation on graphics hardware. Similar to general purpose CPUs, recent graphics hardware can perform various kinds...

Distributed systems, especially clusters, can be used to execute ray tracing tasks in parallel for speeding up the image computation. Because ray tracing is a computational expensive and memory consuming task, ray tracing can also be used to benchmark clusters. This paper introduces task-distributor, a free software solution for the parallel execution of ray tracing tasks in distributed systems...