An Interactive Out-of-Core Rendering Framework for Visualizing Massively Complex Models

Abstract

With the tremendous advances in both hardware capabilities and rendering algorithms, rendering performance is steadily increasing. Even consumer graphics hardware can render many million triangles per second. However, scene complexity seems to be rising even faster than rendering performance, with no end to even more complex models in sight. In this paper, we are targeting the interactive visualization of the "Boeing 777" model, a highly complex model of 350 million individual triangles, which - due to its sheer size and complex internal structure - simply cannot be handled satisfactorily by today's techniques. To render this model, we use a combination of real-time ray tracing, a low-level out of core caching and demand loading strategy, and a hierarchical, hybrid volumetric/lightfield-like approximation scheme for representing not-yet-loaded geometry. With this approach, we are able to render the full 777 model at several frames per second even on a single commodity desktop PC.