Interactive Ray Tracing of Large Models Using Voxel Hierarchies

Interactive Ray Tracing of Large Models Using Voxel Hierarchies
Attila T. Áfra
Computer Graphics Forum 31(1)
Presented at Eurographics 2013

Abstract
We propose an efficient approach for interactive visualization of massive models with CPU ray tracing. A voxel-based 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.

Paper (personal copy, high-res): PDF
Paper (definitive version): Wiley, Eurographics
EG2013 slides (with new videos): PPTX
Video (real-time): YouTube
Citation: BibTeX

The Boeing 777 data set was provided by and used with permission of The Boeing Company.