Interactive Ray Tracing of Large Models Using Voxel Hierarchies

Attila T. Áfra
Department of Control Engineering and Information Technology, Budapest University of Technology and Economics,
Budapest, Magyar Tudósok krt. 2, HUNGARY
attila.afra@gmail.com

Abstract:

We propose an efficient approach for interactive visualization of massive models with CPU ray tracing. A voxelbased hierarchical level-of-detail (LOD) framework is employed to minimize rendering time and required system memory. In a preprocessing phase, a compressed out-of-core data structure is constructed, which contains the original primitives of the model and the LOD voxels, organized into a kd-tree. During rendering, data is loaded asynchronously to ensure a smooth inspection of the model regardless of the available I/O bandwidth. With our technique, we are able to explore data sets consisting of hundreds of millions of triangles in real-time on a desktop PC with a quad-core CPU.

Keywords:

Out-of-core rendering, ray tracing, interactive walkthrough, Boeing model.