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Non-linear beam tracing on a GPU

  • Baoquan Liu
    ,
  • Li-Yi Wei
    ,
  • Xu Yang
    ,
  • Chongyang Ma
    ,
  • Ying-Qing Xu
    ,
  • Baining Guo
  • Chinese Academy of Sciences
    ,
  • Microsoft Research (MSR)
    ,
  • Microsoft Research Asia
    ,
  • Tsinghua University
    ,
  • University of Macau
Research Output: Contribution to journal Article Peer-review

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.

Publication Information

Output type

Research Output: Contribution to journal Article Peer-review

Original language

English

Pages from-to (Number of pages)

Pages 2156-2169

Journal (Volume, Issue Number)

Computer Graphics Forum (Volume 30, Issue 8)

Publication milestones

  • Published - 01/12/2011

Publication status

Published - 01/12/2011

ISSN

0167-7055

External Publication IDs

  • handle.net: 10547/224158
  • Scopus: 84889605006

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