Efficient Ray Tracing of Complex Natural Scenes

Christoph Traxler, Michael Gervautz
Efficient Ray Tracing of Complex Natural Scenes
In Proceedings of Fractal 97. 1997.
[paper]

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Abstract

In this paper we present a method for the consistent modelling and efficient ray tracing of complex natural scenes. Both plants and terrains are modelled and represented in the same way to allow mutual influences of their appearance and interdependencies of their geometry. Plants are generated together with a fractal terrain, so that they directly grow on it. This allows an accurate calculation of reflections and the cast of shadows. The scenes are modeled with a special kind of PL-Systems and are represented by cyclic object-instancing graphs. This is a very compact representation for ray tracing, which avoids restrictions to the complexity of the scenes. To significantly increase the efficiency of ray tracing with this representation an adaptation of conventional optimization techniques to cyclic graphs is necessary. In this paper we introduce methods for the calculation of a bounding box hierarchy and the use of a regular 3d-grid for cyclic graphs.

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BibTeX

@inproceedings{traxler-1997-TRA,
  title =      "Efficient Ray Tracing of Complex Natural Scenes",
  author =     "Christoph Traxler and Michael Gervautz",
  year =       "1997",
  abstract =   "In this paper we present a method for the consistent
               modelling and efficient ray tracing of complex natural
               scenes. Both plants and terrains are modelled and
               represented in the same way to allow mutual influences of
               their appearance and interdependencies of their geometry.
               Plants are generated together with a fractal terrain, so
               that they directly grow on it. This allows an accurate
               calculation of reflections and the cast of shadows. The
               scenes are modeled with a special kind of PL-Systems and are
               represented by cyclic object-instancing graphs. This is a
               very compact representation for ray tracing, which avoids
               restrictions to the complexity of the scenes. To
               significantly increase the efficiency of ray tracing with
               this representation an adaptation of conventional
               optimization techniques to cyclic graphs is necessary. In
               this paper we introduce methods for the calculation of a
               bounding box hierarchy and the use of a regular 3d-grid for
               cyclic graphs.",
  booktitle =  "Proceedings of Fractal 97",
  editor =     "M. M. Novak and T. G. Dewey",
  location =   "Denver, Colorado",
  publisher =  "World Scientific Publishers",
  keywords =   "Cyclic Object Instancing Graphs, PL-systems, Natural
               Phenomena , Ray Tracing",
  URL =        "https://www.cg.tuwien.ac.at/research/publications/1997/traxler-1997-TRA/",
}