BVH for efficient raytracing of dynamic metaballs on GPU
Talk - SIGGRAPH 2009, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA
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Abstract
Using a specifically adapted BVH and the secant method for ray-metaballs intersection computation, we provide an efficient and robust metaballs raytracer able to capture advanced lighting effects, such as reflections, refraction and accurate shadows, without the need for an intermediate representation. Our BVH allows to drastically reduce the number of ray-isosurface intersection while the secant technique provides an accurate intersection computation for arbitrary finite-support metaballs. A CUDA implementation of our method allows the rendering of hundred-thousands metaballs at interactive to real-time frame rate.
Raytracing of metaballs, with shadows from one omni-directional light and 3 levels of mirror reflections: (left) 1000 metaballs at 13 fps at a 640x480 resolution without multi-sampling; (center) 200K metaballs at 0.3 fps at 1600x1200 with 4 rays per pixel; (right) 3000 metaballs at 1.1 fps at 1600x1200 with 4 rays per pixel.