Non-Linear Beam Tracing on a GPU
Baoquan Liu, Li-Yi Wei, Xu Yang, Chongyang Ma, Ying-Qing Xu, Baining Guo, Enhua Wu
In Computer Graphics Forum, 30(8), December 2011.
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.
Keyword(s): nonlinear beam tracing, real-time rendering, GPU techniques, reflection, refraction
Article URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8659.2011.01905.x
BibTeX format:
@article{Liu:2011:NBT,
  author = {Baoquan Liu and Li-Yi Wei and Xu Yang and Chongyang Ma and Ying-Qing Xu and Baining Guo and Enhua Wu},
  title = {Non-Linear Beam Tracing on a GPU},
  journal = {Computer Graphics Forum},
  volume = {30},
  number = {8},
  pages = {2156--2169},
  month = dec,
  year = {2011},
}
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