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An Efficient Technology of Real-Time Modeling of Height Field Surface on the Ray Tracing Pipeline

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Abstract

In this paper, based on height field surface example, an efficient technology of real-time modeling of complex procedural objects on the ray tracing pipeline (RT-pipeline) is proposed. The proposed technology doesn’t overload the I-shader stage (intersection shader), but distributes the computational load between the I-shader and the AH-shader (any-hit shader). The key innovations of the technology are the early rejection at the I-shader stage of the bounding boxes (AABBs) extracted by the RT-pipeline hardware unit, and the “transparent AABB” concept which allows transferring costly computing of the “ray-procedural object” intersection to a later AH-shader stage. The paper also describes a number of modifications that reduce the amount of such calculations. The proposed technology was implemented in a software complex in C++, GLSL and using the Vulkan API. The performance of the developed solution was studied under various ray tracing conditions on the task of modeling the surface of a detailed Puget Sound height field. The obtained results confirmed efficiency of the developed technology and the possibility of its application in virtual environment systems, simulators, scientific visualization, etc.

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Notes

  1. To implement this, we set the transparency flag gl_RayFlagsNoOpaqueEXT when calling the traceRayEXT function of generating the ray r at the RG-shader stage. This allows the AH-shader stage to be enabled (by default it is disabled in the RT-pipeline) and the BVH-tree traversal loop to be continued along the branch “No”, coming from the unit “Opaque object?”, after passing the I-shader stage (see Fig. 3).

  2. We are grateful to Professor John H. Reppy from the University of Chicago (Department of Computer Science) for his assistance in providing access to a detailed version of the Puget Sound height grid [38].

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Funding

The publication is made within the state task of Federal State Institution “Scientific Research Institute for System Analysis of the Russian Academy of Sciences” on “Carrying out basic scientific researches (47 GP)” on topic no. FNEF-2022-0012 “Virtual environment systems: technologies, methods and algorithms of mathematical modeling and visualization. 0580-2022-0012”.

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  1. Federal State Institution “Scientific Research Institute for System Analysis of the Russian Academy of Sciences”, Nakhimovskii pr. 36/1, 117218, Moscow, Russia

    P. Y. Timokhin & M. V. Mikhaylyuk

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Timokhin, P.Y., Mikhaylyuk, M.V. An Efficient Technology of Real-Time Modeling of Height Field Surface on the Ray Tracing Pipeline. Program Comput Soft 49, 178–186 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1134/S0361768823030064

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