Non‐Linear Beam Tracing on a GPU
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Date
2011
Journal Title
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Publisher
The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Abstract
Beam tracing combines the flexibility of ray tracing and the speed of polygon rasterization. However, beam tracing so far only handles linear transformations; thus, it is only applicable to linear effects such as planar mirror reflections but not to non‐linear effects such as curved mirror reflection, refraction, caustics and shadows. In this paper, we introduce non‐linear beam tracing to render these non‐linear effects. Non‐linear beam tracing is highly challenging because commodity graphics hardware supports only linear vertex transformation and triangle rasterization. We overcome this difficulty by designing a non‐linear graphics pipeline and implementing it on top of a commodity GPU. This allows beams to be non‐linear where rays within the same beam do not have to be parallel or intersect at a single point. Using these non‐linear beams, real‐time GPU applications can render secondary rays via polygon streaming similar to how they render primary rays. A major strength of this methodology is that it naturally supports fully dynamic scenes without the need to pre‐store a scene database. Utilizing our approach, non‐linear ray tracing effects can be rendered in real‐time on a commodity GPU under a unified framework.
Description
@article{10.1111:j.1467-8659.2011.01905.x,
journal = {Computer Graphics Forum},
title = {{Non‐Linear Beam Tracing on a GPU}},
author = {Liu, Baoquan and Wei, Li‐Yi and Yang, Xu and Ma, Chongyang and Xu, Ying‐Qing and Guo, Baining and Wu, Enhua},
year = {2011},
publisher = {The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.},
ISSN = {1467-8659},
DOI = {10.1111/j.1467-8659.2011.01905.x}
}