Non‐Linear Beam Tracing on a GPU

dc.contributor.authorLiu, Baoquanen_US
dc.contributor.authorWei, Li‐Yien_US
dc.contributor.authorYang, Xuen_US
dc.contributor.authorMa, Chongyangen_US
dc.contributor.authorXu, Ying‐Qingen_US
dc.contributor.authorGuo, Bainingen_US
dc.contributor.authorWu, Enhuaen_US
dc.contributor.editorEduard Groeller and Holly Rushmeieren_US
dc.date.accessioned2015-02-27T16:45:30Z
dc.date.available2015-02-27T16:45:30Z
dc.date.issued2011en_US
dc.description.abstractBeam 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.en_US
dc.description.number8
dc.description.seriesinformationComputer Graphics Forumen_US
dc.description.volume30
dc.identifier.issn1467-8659en_US
dc.identifier.urihttps://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8659.2011.01905.xen_US
dc.publisherThe Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.en_US
dc.titleNon‐Linear Beam Tracing on a GPUen_US
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