Real-time Ray Tracing through the Eyes of a Game Developer

Abstract

There has been and is a tremendous amount of research on the topic of ray tracing, spurred by the relatively recent advent of real-time ray tracing and the inevitable appearance of consumer hardware capable of handling this rendering algorithm. Besides researchers, the prospect of a brave new world attracts hobbyists (such as demo coders) and game developers: Ray tracing promises an elegant and fascinating alternative to z-buffer approaches, as well as more intuitive graphics and games development. This article provides a view from the inside on ray tracing in games and demos, where the emphasis is on performance and shortterm practical usability. It covers the way science is applied, the unique contribution of these developers to the field and their link with the research community.The Arauna ray tracer, developed at the NHTV university of applied science, is used as an example of a ray tracer that has been specifically build with games and performance in mind. Its purpose and architecture, as well as some implementation details are presented. BioJacco Bikker is a lecturer for the International Architecture and Design course of the University of Applied Sciences, Breda, The Netherlands. Before that, he worked in the Dutch game industry for ten years, for companies such as Lost Boys Interactive, Davilex, Overloaded PocketMedia and Woedend! Games. Besides his job, he wrote articles on topics such as ray tracing, rasterization, visibility determination, artificial intelligence and game development for developer websites such as Flipcode.com and Gamasutra.

RayCore

“…For more effective handling of dynamic scenes, we combine the two-tree approach [Bikker 2007] and the two-level approach [Wald et al 2003]. We first classify the objects in the scene as static or dynamic.…”

“…In the T&I unit, the top-level dynamic tree is traversed before the traversal of the static tree. This partial update strategy is very useful to reduce tree construction workloads if the greater part of the scene is static [Bikker 2007;Kang et al 2013].…”

LiSA: Auf dem Weg zur sicheren Assistenzrobotik

“…Bei der Lokalisierung wurde von einem bekannten Umgebungsmodell ausgegangen und die im Player-Framework existierende 2D-Monte-Carlo-Lokalisierung mit 3D-Sensordaten kombiniert. Bei der Implementierung wurde dabei ein BSPBaum (Binary Space Partition Tree [4,5]) zur Repräsen-tation des 3D-Umgebungsmodells verwendet, wodurch der Abgleich der Sensordaten mit dem Modell ebenso effizient durchführbar ist, wie bei vergleichbaren Verfahren in 2D.…”

Razor

“…The models used these images appear courtesy of their respective owners. 1 [Parker et al 1999[Parker et al , 2010Woop et al 2005Woop et al , 2006Reshetov et al 2005;Wächter and Keller 2006;Lauterbach et al 2006;Bigler et al 2006;Wald et al 2007a;Bikker 2007;Caustic Graphics 2009] demonstrate that interactive ray tracing is starting to become a viable technique. Yet these existing systems typically have serious limitations that make them impractical or insufficient for most mainstream interactive applications.…”