PantaRay: Fast Ray-traced Occlusion Caching of Massive Scenes
We describe the architecture of a novel system for precomputing
sparse directional occlusion caches. These caches are used for accelerating
a fast cinematic lighting pipeline that works in the spherical
harmonics domain. The system was used as a primary lighting
technology in the movie Avatar, and is able to efficiently handle
massive scenes of unprecedented complexity through the use of
a flexible, stream-based geometry processing architecture, a novel
out-of-core algorithm for creating efficient ray tracing acceleration
structures, and a novel out-of-core GPU ray tracing algorithm for
the computation of directional occlusion and spherical integrals at
arbitrary points.
Publication Date
Published in
Research Area
Copyright
Copyright by the Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from Publications Dept, ACM Inc., fax +1 (212) 869-0481, or permissions@acm.org. The definitive version of this paper can be found at ACM's Digital Library http://www.acm.org/dl/.