Real-time ray tracing of implicit surfaces on the GPU.

Area of Science:

• Computer Graphics
• Geometric Modeling
• GPU Computing

Background:

• Programmable graphics processor units (GPUs) are well-suited for compact geometry representations and ray tracing.
• Implicit surfaces are widely applicable but have received less attention for GPU rendering.
• Existing methods are limited in rendering arbitrary implicit surfaces efficiently.

Purpose of the Study:

• To present an efficient GPU-based ray-tracing procedure for general implicit surfaces.
• To develop an algorithm capable of rendering arbitrary implicit surfaces, including those with complex roots.
• To achieve high performance for implicit surface rendering on modern GPUs.

Main Methods:

• An adaptive marching points algorithm for ray tracing arbitrary implicit surfaces.
• Sampling rays at selected points until a root is found, adapting step size using proximity and horizon measures.
• Utilizing the sign test for surfaces without multiple roots and the Taylor test for surfaces with complex roots.

Main Results:

• Demonstrated efficient ray tracing of algebraic surfaces up to order 50.
• Successfully rendered non-algebraic surfaces, including a complex Blinn's blobby.
• Achieved rendering frame rates better than interactive speeds on GPUs.

Conclusions:

• The proposed simple algorithm effectively utilizes the GPU's SIMD architecture for high-performance rendering.
• The adaptive marching points method provides a versatile solution for ray tracing a wide range of implicit surfaces.
• This work advances the state-of-the-art in real-time rendering of complex geometric models on GPUs.