Optimizing Ray Tracing of Trimmed NURBS Surfaces on the GPU

Abstract

The representation of geometric models by trimmed NURBS surfaces has become a standard in the CAD industry. In CAD applications, the rendering of surfaces is usually solved by tessellation followed up by z-buffer rendering. Ray tracing of NURBS surfaces has not been widely used in industry due to its computational complexity that hinders achieving real-time performance in practice. We propose novel methods achieving faster point location search needed by trimming in the context of ray tracing trimmed NURBS surfaces. The proposed 2D data structure based on kd-trees allows for faster ray tracing while it requires less memory for its representation and less preprocessing time than previously published methods. Further, we show the current state of the art for ray tracing trimmed NURBS surfaces on a GPU. With careful design and implementation, the number of rays cast on a GPU may reach real-time performance in the order of tens to hundreds of million rays per second for moderately to large complex scenes containing hundreds of thousands of NURBS surfaces and trimming curves.