Abstract

Figure 1: Examples of interactively rendering complex and dynamic scenes with a ray-tracing-based renderer. The scenes show a pre-lighted theatre, robots moving through a city, large numbers of moving trees with sharp shadows, as well as the integration of volumes, lightfields, and procedural shading in an office environment. These examples run interactively at a resolution of 640 × 480 using four to eight dual PCs. Ray-tracing is well-known as a general and flexible rendering algorithm that generates high-quality images. But in the past, raytracing implementations were too slow to be used in an interactive context. Recently, the performance of ray-tracing has been increased by over an order of magnitude, making it interesting as an alternative to rasterization-based rendering. We present a new rendering engine for interactive 3D graphics based on a fast, scalable, and distributed ray-tracer. It offers an extended OpenGL-like API, supports interactive modifications of the scene, handles complex scenes with millions of polygons, and scales efficiently to many client machines. We demonstrate that the new renderer provides more flexibility, more rendering features, and higher performance for complex scenes than current rasterization hardware. Its flexibility enables new types of applications including a system for interactive global illumination.

Citations