62 results about "Ray tracing (graphics)" patented technology

A method for processing three-dimensional data that defines a three-dimensional scene, and determining and displaying lines-of-sight (LOS) and viewsheds on all visible surfaces of the scene, includes: i) assigning at a user-selected location at least one viewpoint in the scene; ii) applying ray tracing from locations in the scene to the viewpoint to determine locations in the scene that are in a line of sight (LOS) and outside the LOS of the viewpoint, thus determining the viewshed relative to the viewpoint while generating a set of color-coding information; iv) saving the set of color-coding information as a 2D texture image in graphics hardware memory; and v) compositing the 2D texture image over the 3D scene in a 3D window at a frame rate that enables real-time updating of the color coding as the scene is translated or rotated or the viewpoint is changed.

Methods, systems, devices and computer program code (software) products operable within a computer graphics system or other computer system enable quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) light transport simulation by ray tracing: and include constructing a bounding interval hierarchy (BIH), within a computer, using quantized planes to reduce memory requirements while maintaining a selected degree of precision.

A method for calculating a lighting function for an object to be rendered using a basis function is provided. The method includes calculating a transfer function approximation of the lighting function through a stream processor. A method for presenting lighting characteristics associated with a display object in real-time and a method for determining secondary illumination features for an object to be displayed are also provided. A computer readable medium and a computing device having a graphics processing unit capable of determining lighting characteristics for an object in real time are also included.

Systems and techniques are described for ray tracing and for the efficient construction of acceleration data structures required for fast ray tracing. A computer graphics system generates, for each pixel in an image, a pixel value that is representative of a point in a scene as recorded on an image plane of a simulated camera. The computer graphics system is configured to generate the pixel value for an image using a selected ray-tracing methodology. The selected ray-tracing methodology includes the use of a ray tree that includes at least one ray shot from the pixel into a scene along a selected direction. The ray-tracing methodology further includes calculating the intersections of rays and surfaces in the scene. An axis-aligned bounding box is defined that contains, for a given ray, the point of intersection of the ray and surface nearest the origin of the ray. The bounding box is iteratively refined until a predetermined termination criterion has been met.

The present invention relates to computer graphics applications involving scene rendering using objects modeled at multiple levels of detail. In accordance with an aspect of the invention, a ray tracer implementation allows users to specify multiple versions of a particular object, categorized by LOD ID's. A scene server selects the version appropriate for the particular scene, based on the size of the object on the screen for example, and provides a smooth transition between multiple versions of an object model. In one example, the scene server will select two LOD representations associated with a given object and assign relative weights to each representation. The LOD weights are specified to indicate how to blend these representations together. A ray tracer computes the objects hit by camera rays associated with pixels in the camera window, as well as secondary rays in recursive implementations, and rays striking LOD objects are detected and shaded in accordance with the weights assigned to the different representations. Embodiments are disclosed for level of detail control using both forward ray tracing and backward ray tracing, including handling of camera rays, reflected rays, refracted rays and shadow rays.

A panoramic annular lens system (PAL), a unitary video camera and a PCbased software system that unwraps a 360 DEG video image into a seamless, distortion free horizontal image in real time. The PAL system of the preferred embodiment has a 360 DEG horizontal field of view and a 90 DEG vertical field of view in a 40mm diameter compact package. The invention is not limited to any particular type of lens system. In fact, there are numerous lens systems for providing a 360 DEG panoramic view. The video camera may be a CCD or CMOS based device having a pixel resolution of either 1280 x 1024 (high resolution) or 720 x 480 (NTSC). The unwrapping system is a radiometric ray tracing program carried out using a computer's graphics card capabilities to produce highly efficient regional transformation while minimizing software overhead. The result is real time, high resolution 30 fps conversion from a spherical distorted image to a flat panoramic image in Cartesian coordinates.

Cloud-based real time rendering. For example, one embodiment of a system comprises: a first graphics processing node to perform a first set of graphics processing operations to render a graphics scene, the first set of graphics processing operations comprising ray-tracing independent operations; an interconnect or network interface coupling the first graphics processing node to a second graphics processing node; the second graphics processing node to receive an indication of a current view of a user of the first graphics processing node and to receive or construct a view-independent surface generated by view-independent ray traversal and intersection operations; the second graphics processing node to responsively perform a view-dependent translation of the view-independent surface based on the current view of the user to generate a view-dependent surface and to provide the view-dependent surface to the first graphics processing node; and the first graphics processing node to perform a second set of graphics processing operations to complete rendering of the graphics scene using the view-dependent surface.

A ray tracing image processing system may use a plurality of processing elements to render a two dimensional image from a three dimensional scene. A first portion of the processing elements may function as workload managers responsible for performing operations relating to traversing a ray through a spatial index, and a second portion of the processing elements may function as vector throughput engines responsible for performing operations relating to determining if a ray intersects primitives contained within bounding volumes. By monitoring workloads experienced by the processing elements for a particular frame, processing element function may be reallocated such that for a subsequent frame the workload experienced by processing elements in the image processing system may be balanced. Balanced workload may improve the performance of the image processing system.

The invention belongs to the field of computer graphics and acoustics, and provides a novel method capable of interactively simulating the propagation effect of underwater sound containing a mobile interception source. According to the technical scheme adopted by the invention, the underwater sound propagation simulation method based on a coupling method comprises a scene preprocessing stage, a calculation preprocessing stage and an operation stage; in the scene preprocessing stage, a frequency boundary is determined according to size distribution of objects in a scene, and space division is performed: the scene is divided into boundary scattering, object scattering and medium scattering; in the calculation preprocessing stage, the scattering effect is considered to be combined with decomposition of a space field and a frequency field, and sound propagation losses of different scattering domains are calculated by adopting a ray tracing method and a simple positive wave method respectively. The method is mainly applied to sound processing occasions.

An exemplary lightmap management system is implemented by a multi-access edge compute (“MEC”) server. The system accesses graphics data representative of a 3D model of an object included at a first location within a 3D scene, and identifies a second location from which a light source illuminates the object. The system generates or updates a dynamic lightmap for the object represented by the 3D model based on raytracing of virtual light rays from the second location to the first location. The system provides the dynamic lightmap to a media player device communicatively coupled to the MEC server and configured to apply the dynamic lightmap to the 3D model. For example, the applying of the dynamic lightmap may be performed as part of a rendering of an image that depicts the 3D scene from a viewpoint selected by a user to whom the media player device is presenting the 3D scene.

The invention discloses a method for quickly simplifying and automatically optimizing sound velocity profile based on maximum offset of sound velocity (MOV), and provides detailed comprehensive technical process so as to solve the problem that the work efficiency of multi-beam detection and data processing is seriously influenced because the original sound velocity profile has large data quantity. An MOV method is provided and is used for deleting the redundant points of automatically and quickly and evaluating the influence of the simplified sound velocity profile on precision of multi-beam depth sounding through ray tracing and error analysis. According to actual tests, the simplification rate of the processed sound velocity profile reaches 90%, and the multi-beam footprint calculation requirement can be met by evaluating the precision of the sound velocity profile. By the method, multi-beam surveying and data processing time can be greatly reduced, and multi-beam work efficiency can be effectively improved by more than three times. The method has an important actual application value in the aspects of hydrographic surveying and charting, multi-beam surveying, a marine geographic information system, computer graphics, submarine science research and the like, and can be popularized and used.

A graphic processing apparatus and method for processing ray tracing may include a plurality of traversal units to process traversal of a ray. A management unit of the graphics processing apparatus may distribute data of the ray processed by the graphics processing apparatus to the plurality of traversal units. Each of the plurality of traversal units may process ray traversal with respect to a subdivision of the entire space.

Multi-pass apparatus and method for ray tracing shading. For example, one embodiment of an apparatus comprises: graphics processing circuitry to execute a sequence of visibility testing operations related to texels within a texture domain to generate visibility results; a register or memory to store a texel mask; texel mask update circuitry / logic to update the texel mask based on the visibility results, the texel mask comprising a plurality of bits to indicate visibility of the texels within the texture domain, the texel mask update circuitry / logic to set a first bit to indicate whether any bits in the texel mask indicate a visible texel; a shader dispatcher to initiate conditional dispatch operations only if the first bit is set to indicate that at least one bit in the texel mask indicates a visible texel, wherein to perform the conditional dispatch operations, the shader dispatcher is to dispatch texel shaders for only those texels that the texel mask indicates may be visible; and a plurality of execution units (EUs) to execute the shaders dispatched by the shader dispatcher.

Embodiments of the invention provide methods and apparatus for reallocating workload related to traversal of a ray through a spatial index. In a first operating state a workload manager may be experiencing a first or a normal workload. In the first operating state the workload manager may be responsible for traversing the entire spatial index and a vector throughput engine may be responsible for performing ray-primitive intersection tests. In an increased workload state the workload manager may experience an increased workload. In response to the increased workload the image processing system may partition the spatial index such that the workload manager may be responsible for traversing a first portion of the spatial index and the vector throughput engine may be responsible for traversing a second portion of the spatial index and for performing ray-primitive intersection tests.

In some aspects, systems and methods provide for forming groupings of a plurality of independently-specified computation workloads, such as graphics processing workloads, and in a specific example, ray tracing workloads. The workloads include a scheduling key, which is one basis on which the groupings can be formed. Workloads grouped together can all execute from the same source of instructions, one or more different private data elements. Such workloads can recursively instantiate other workloads that reference the same private data elements. In some examples, the scheduling key can be used to identify a data element to be used by all the workloads of a grouping. Memory conflicts to private data elements are handled through scheduling of non-conflicted workloads or specific instructions an deferring conflicted workloads instead of locking memory locations.