Direct and Fast Ray Tracing of NURBS Surfaces

Recently it has been shown that Bezier surfaces can be used as a geometric primitive for interactive ray tracing on a single commodity PC. However, the Bezier representation is restricted, as a large number of control points also imply a high polynomial degree, thus reducing the frame rate significa...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Abert, O., Geimer, M., Muller, S.
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Subjects:
Computational geometry
Computer graphics
Electronic mail
free-form surfaces
interactive rendering
NURBS
Polynomials
Ray tracing
Rendering (computer graphics)
Solid modeling
Spline
Surface reconstruction
Surface topography
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Summary:Recently it has been shown that Bezier surfaces can be used as a geometric primitive for interactive ray tracing on a single commodity PC. However, the Bezier representation is restricted, as a large number of control points also imply a high polynomial degree, thus reducing the frame rate significantly. In this work we present a fast, efficient and robust algorithm to ray trace trimmed NURBS surfaces of arbitrary degree. Furthermore, our approach is largely independent of the number of control points of a surface with respect to the rendering performance. Additionally the degree and the number of control points of a surface do not influence the numerical stability of the intersection algorithm. The desired high performance is achieved by taking a novel approach of surface evaluation, which requires only minimal preprocessing. We present a method to transform the computationally expensive Cox-de Boor recursion into a SIMD suitable form that maximizes performance by avoiding the recursion and drastically reduces the number of executed commands
DOI:10.1109/RT.2006.280227