The goal of this master thesis is to study, compare, and improve existing approaches for direct ray tracing trimmed NURBS surfaces. In order to be able to study the topic efficiently, a library for NURBS evaluation has been implemented. The library is supposed to be easily integrated in any ray tracing application to make it support direct ray tracing trimmed NURBS surfaces.

We propose a GA ray-tracing method which applies a genetic algorithm to ray tracing in order to complete the large-scale computation of estimating radio propagation in a practical amount of time. We describe the GA ray-tracing method as well as a demonstration of its effectiveness through numerical simulation .

3D ray tracing produces accurate, deterministic channel models for wireless system design. Increasing a ray tracing algorithm's ability to identify correct propagation paths reduces the kinematic errors of a simulation. This paper presents a new 3D ray tracing technique that reduces kinematic errors associated with ray launching algorithms. This work is sponsored by the NSF Presidential Faculty...

Recent research on high-performance ray tracing has achieved real-time performance even for highly complex surface models already on a single PC. In this report we provide an overview of techniques for extending real-time ray tracing also to interactive volume rendering. We review fast rendering techniques for different volume representations and rendering modes in a variety of computing enviro...

3 Simulation of Extended Sources 10 3.1 Global Illumination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 3.1.1 Ray Tracing, Radiosity, and Alternative Solutions . . 11 3.2 Methodology for Ray Tracing Extended Area Sources . . . . 13 3.2.1 Pre-Render Calculations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 3.2.2 Pre-Render Calculation of Source Area . . . . . . . . . 13 3.2.3 Rendering . . . . . ...

Ray-primitive intersection tests are the most important operations in ray tracing. The ray-box culling algorithm was presented to accelerate these intersection tests on grid structures, but this algorithm has not been widely used due to the poor ray traversal performance of the grid structures themselves. In this paper, we demonstrate how to apply this algorithm to tree structures and investiga...

Monte Carlo ray tracing programs are now being used to solve many optical analysis problems in which the entire optomechanical system must be considered. In many analyses, it is desired to consider the effects of diffraction by mechanical edges. Smoothly melding the effects of diffraction, a wave phenomenon, into a ray-tracing program is a significant technical challenge. This paper discusses t...

A method of ray tracing for free-form optical surfaces has been developed. The ray tracing through such surfaces is based on Delaunay triangulation of the discrete data of the surface and is related to finite-element modeling. Some numerical examples of applications to analytical, noisy, and experimental free-form surfaces (in particular, a corneal topography map) are presented. Ray-tracing res...

Ray tracing has become a very popular method for image synthesis due to its un paralleled exibility and its ability the generate images of high quality and realism Simulation of e ects such as re ection and refraction have been the hallmarks of ray tracing since its introduction With the advent of stochastic ray tracing the range of e ects expanded to include motion blur soft shadows depth of e...