Adaptive Progressive Vertex Tracing for Interactive Reflections

Abstract

This paper presents an approach for real-time rendering of physically accurate reflection effects in virtual environments. We apply a hybrid rendering of an OpenGL-generated scene, blended with correct reflection characteristics of selected scene objects. The core of the approach consists of a special type of ray tracing, the so-called vertex tracing. Real-time performance, even for complex CAD scenes, is achieved by progressive adaptive refinement, (derived from the geometry in object space) as well as by parallelization of the algorithm. A mesh-based load balancing yields a uniform distribution of the computing load in a heterogeneous network with resources with widely varying performance. The performance of the overall system is demonstrated using a truck interior in a Virtual Reality simulator.