“A Compressed Representation for Ray Tracing Parametric Surfaces” by Guthe, Selgrad, Lier, Martinek, Buchenau, et al. …

  • ©Michael Guthe, Kai Selgrad, Alexander Lier, Magdalena Martinek, Christoph Buchenau, Franziska Mueller, Henry Schafer, and Marc Stamminger

Conference:


Type:


Title:

    A Compressed Representation for Ray Tracing Parametric Surfaces

Session/Category Title: Rendering Systems

Presenter(s)/Author(s):


Moderator(s):


Abstract:


    Parametric surfaces are an essential modeling tool in computer aided design and movie production. Even though their use is well established in industry, generating ray-traced images adds significant cost in time and memory consumption. Ray tracing such surfaces is usually accomplished by subdividing the surfaces on the fly, or by conversion to a polygonal representation. However, on-the-fly subdivision is computationally very expensive, whereas polygonal meshes require large amounts of memory. This is a particular problem for parametric surfaces with displacement, where very fine tessellation is required to faithfully represent the shape. Hence, memory restrictions are the major challenge in production rendering. In this article, we present a novel solution to this problem. We propose a compression scheme for a priori Bounding Volume Hierarchies (BVHs) on parametric patches, that reduces the data required for the hierarchy by a factor of up to 48. We further propose an approximate evaluation method that does not require leaf geometry, yielding an overall reduction of memory consumption by a factor of 60 over regular BVHs on indexed face sets and by a factor of 16 over established state-of-the-art compression schemes. Alternatively, our compression can simply be applied to a standard BVH while keeping the leaf geometry, resulting in a compression rate of up to 2:1 over current methods. Although decompression generates additional costs during traversal, we can manage very complex scenes even on the memory restrictive GPU at competitive render times.

References:


    1. Oliver Abert, Markus Geimer, and Stefan Mulle. 2006. Direct and fast ray tracing of NURBS surfaces. In Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Interactive Ray Tracing. 161–168. Google ScholarCross Ref
    2. Timo Aila and Samuli Laine. 2009. Understanding the efficiency of ray traversal on GPUs. In Proceedings of the Conference on High Performance Graphics.145–149. Google ScholarDigital Library
    3. Pablo Bauszat, Martin Eisemann, and Marcus A. Magnor. 2010. The minimal bounding volume hierarchy. In Vision, Modeling, and Visualization. 227–234.Google Scholar
    4. Carsten Benthin, Solomon Boulos, Dylan Lacewell, and Ingo Wald. 2007. Packet-based Ray Tracing of Catmull-Clark Subdivision Surfaces. SCI Institute, University of Utah, Technical Report# UUSCI-2007-011.Google Scholar
    5. Carsten Benthin, Sven Woop, Matthias Nießner, Kai Selgrad, and Ingo Wald. 2015. Efficient ray tracing of subdivision surfaces using tessellation caching. In Proceedings of the 7th High-Performance Graphics Conference. ACM. Google ScholarDigital Library
    6. Brent Burley and Dylan Lacewell. 2008. Ptex: Per-face texture mapping for production rendering. Computer Graphics Forum 27, 4 (2008), 1155–1164. Google ScholarDigital Library
    7. Edwin Catmull and James Clark. 1978. Recursively generated b-spline surfaces on arbitrary topological meshes. Computer-Aided Design 10, 6 (1978), 350–355. Google ScholarCross Ref
    8. Per H. Christensen, Julian Fong, David M. Laur, and Dana Batali. 2006. Ray tracing for the movie “cars.” In Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Interactive Ray Tracing. 1–6. Google ScholarCross Ref
    9. Per H. Christensen, David M. Laur, Julia Fong, Wayne L. Wooten, and Dana Batali. 2003. Ray differentials and multiresolution geometry caching for distribution ray tracing in complex scenes. Computer Graphics Forum 22, 3 (2003), 543–552. Google ScholarCross Ref
    10. Robert L. Cook, Loren Carpenter, and Edwin Catmull. 1987. The Reyes image rendering architecture. ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics 21, 4 (1987), 95–102. Google ScholarDigital Library
    11. Cyril Crassin. 2011. GigaVoxels (A Voxel-Based Rendering Pipeline for Efficient Exploration of Large and Detailed Scenes). Ph.D. Dissertation. Universite de Grenoble.Google Scholar
    12. Tony DeRose, Michael Kass, and Tien Truong. 1998. Subdivision surfaces in character animation. In Proceedings of the 25th Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques. 85–94. Google ScholarDigital Library
    13. Christian Eisenacher, Gregory Nichols, Andrew Selle, and Brent Burley. 2013. Sorted deferred shading for production path tracing. Computer Graphics Forum 32, 4 (2013), 125–132. Google ScholarDigital Library
    14. Markus Geimer and Oliver Abert. 2005. Interactive ray tracing of trimmed bicubic Bézier surfaces without triangulation. In WSCG 2005 Conference Proceedings. 71–78.Google Scholar
    15. Hugues Hoppe, Tony DeRose, Tom Duchamp, Mark Halstead, Hubert Jin, John McDonald, Jean Schweitzer, and Werner Stuetzle. 1994. Piecewise smooth surface reconstruction. In Proceedings of the 21st Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques. 295–302. Google ScholarDigital Library
    16. Erik Hubo, Tom Mertens, Tom Haber, and Philippe Bekaert. 2006. The quantized kd-tree: Efficient ray tracing of compressed point clouds. In Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Interactive Ray Tracing. 105–113. Google ScholarCross Ref
    17. James T. Kajiya. 1982. Ray tracing parametric patches. ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics 16, 3 (1982). Google ScholarDigital Library
    18. Tae-Joon Kim, Yongyoung Byun, Yongjin Kim, Bochang Moon, Seungyong Lee, and Sung-Eui Yoon. 2010a. HCCMeshes: Hierarchical-culling oriented compact meshes. Computer Graphics Forum 29, 2 (2010), 299–308. Google ScholarCross Ref
    19. Tae-Joon Kim, Bochang Moon, Duksu Kim, and Sung-Eui Yoon. 2010b. RACBVHs: Random-accessible compressed bounding volume hierarchies. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 16, 2 (2010), 273–286. Google ScholarDigital Library
    20. Samuli Laine, Tero Karras, and Timo Aila. 2013. Megakernels considered harmful: Wavefront path tracing on GPUs. In Proceedings of the 5th High-Performance Graphics Conference. 137–143. Google ScholarDigital Library
    21. Christian Lauterbach, Sung-eui Yoon, Ming Tang, and Dinesh Manocha. 2008. ReduceM: Interactive and memory efficient ray tracing of large models. Computer Graphics Forum 27, 4 (2008), 1313–1321. Google ScholarDigital Library
    22. Jeffrey A. Mahovsky. 2005. Ray Tracing with Reduced-Precision Bounding Volume Hierarchies. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Calgary. Google ScholarDigital Library
    23. Matthias Nießner and Charles Loop. 2013. Analytic displacement mapping using hardware tessellation. ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG) 32, 3 (2013), 26. Google ScholarDigital Library
    24. Matthias Nießner, Charles Loop, Mark Meyer, and Tony Derose. 2012. Feature-adaptive GPU rendering of Catmull-Clark subdivision surfaces. ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG) 31, 1 (2012), 6. Google ScholarDigital Library
    25. Tomoyuki Nishita, Thomas W. Sederberg, and Masanori Kakimoto. 1990. Ray tracing trimmed rational surface patches. In Proceedings of the 17th Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques. 337–345. Google ScholarDigital Library
    26. Jan Novák and Carsten Dachsbacher. 2012. Rasterized bounding volume hierarchies. Computer Graphics Forum 31, 2 (2012), 403–412. Google ScholarDigital Library
    27. Hans Friedrich Pabst, Jan P. Springer, Andre Schollmeyer, Robert Lenhardt, Christian Lessig, and Bernd Froehlich. 2006. Ray casting of trimmed NURBS surfaces on the GPU. In Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Interactive Ray Tracing. 151–160. Google ScholarCross Ref
    28. Matt Pharr, Craig Kolb, Reid Gershbein, and Pat Hanrahan. 1997. Rendering complex scenes with memory-coherent ray tracing. In Proceedings of the 24th Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive. Techniques. 101–108. Google ScholarDigital Library
    29. Alyn Rockwood, Kurt Heaton, and Tom Davis. 1989. Real-time rendering of trimmed surfaces. In Proceedings of the 16th Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques. 107–116. Google ScholarDigital Library
    30. Szymon Rusinkiewicz and Marc Levoy. 2000. QSplat: A multiresolution point rendering system for large meshes. In Proceedings of the 27th Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques. 343–352. Google ScholarDigital Library
    31. H. Schäfer, Matthias Niessner, Benjamin Keinert, Marc Stamminger, and Charles Loop. 2014. State of the art report on real-time rendering with hardware tessellation. In Eurographics 2014 State of the Art Reports. 93–117.Google Scholar
    32. Benjamin Segovia and Manfred Ernst. 2010. Memory efficient ray tracing with hierarchical mesh quantization. In Proceedings of Graphics Interface. 153–160. Google ScholarDigital Library
    33. Leon A. Shirmun and Salim S. Abi-Ezzi. 1993. The cone of normals technique for fast processing of curved patches. Computer Graphics Forum 12, 3 (1993), 261–272. Google ScholarCross Ref
    34. Takahito Tejima, Pixar Animation Studios, Masahiro Fujita, and Toru Matsuoka. 2015. Direct ray tracing of full-featured subdivision surfaces with Bézier clipping. Journal of Computer Graphics Techniques (JCGT) 4, 1 (2015), 69–83.Google Scholar
    35. Daniel L. Toth. 1985. On ray tracing parametric surfaces. ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics 19, 3 (1985), 171–179. Google ScholarDigital Library
    36. Ingo Wald, Solomon Boulos, and Peter Shirley. 2007. Ray tracing deformable scenes using dynamic bounding volume hierarchies. ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG) 26, 1 (2007), 6. Google ScholarDigital Library
    37. Ingo Wald, Sven Woop, Carsten Benthin, Gregory S. Johnson, and Manfred Ernst. 2014. Embree–A ray tracing kernel framework for efficient CPU ray tracing. ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH) (2014). Google ScholarDigital Library
    38. Sung-Eui Yoon, Christian Lauterbach, and Dinesh Manocha. 2006. R-LODs: Fast LOD-based ray tracing of massive models. The Visual Computer 22, 9–11 (2006), 772–784. Google ScholarDigital Library

ACM Digital Library Publication:


Overview Page: