Streaming Hierarchy Traversal Renderer for Complex Scene Geometry
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Solution Overview
Problem
Conventional ray tracing renderers are impractical for complex scenes due to high processing overhead and random data access requirements, while rasterizing renderers provide high performance but only approximate global illumination, making it difficult to achieve realistic lighting in feature films and other demanding applications.
Innovation Solution
A streaming hierarchy traversal renderer is introduced, where camera rays are generated and processed within memory, and object geometry is streamed in coherent nodes using a spatial hierarchy, allowing for efficient data access and parallel processing, reducing latency and improving caching schemes.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Illumination intensity
If ray tracing renderer is used to provide global illumination, then realistic lighting is achieved, but processing overhead increases and data access becomes random making it impractical for complex scenes
Solution Approach 1:
The scene geometry is segmented into a spatial hierarchy (BVH) structure that organizes objects into hierarchical levels. This segmentation allows the renderer to process only relevant portions of the scene at each hierarchy level, reducing the overall processing workload while maintaining global illumination quality through the streaming traversal approach.
Solution Approach 2:
The spatial hierarchy is pre-built and sorted before rendering. Camera rays are pre-sorted by their interaction with the hierarchy levels. This preliminary organization allows the renderer to efficiently traverse the hierarchy in a deterministic manner, avoiding random data access patterns and reducing processing overhead during actual rendering.
2Illumination intensity
If ray tracing renderer is used, then global illumination is provided, but memory requirements grow with scene complexity making it impractical for large scenes
Solution Approach 1:
The scene is divided into a spatial hierarchy structure that segments geometry into manageable levels. The streaming traversal process loads only the necessary hierarchy levels into memory at a time, rather than loading the entire scene. This segmentation approach reduces peak memory requirements while still providing comprehensive global illumination for complex scenes.
Solution Approach 2:
The renderer uses periodic streaming of hierarchy levels during the rendering process. Instead of maintaining all scene data in memory simultaneously, the system periodically loads and processes specific hierarchy levels as needed during the streaming traversal, then discards them. This periodic action reduces memory footprint while maintaining rendering quality.
3Productivity
If rasterizing renderer is used to achieve high performance, then rendering speed is improved, but global illumination becomes approximate reducing realism
Solution Approach 1:
The invention merges the strengths of both ray tracing and rasterization approaches. It combines the performance benefits of rasterization with the accurate global illumination of ray tracing by using a hybrid streaming hierarchy traversal method that processes camera rays through an organized spatial structure, achieving both speed and quality.
Solution Approach 2:
The rendering approach changes the parameter organization from traditional ray tracing by introducing a spatial hierarchy level parameter. This allows the system to process rays in an organized manner through hierarchy levels, changing the fundamental rendering parameter structure to achieve both efficiency and accurate global illumination simultaneously.
4Reliability
If conventional ray tracing is used, then data access is random, but this increases processing overhead and reduces efficiency for complex scenes
Solution Approach 1:
The spatial hierarchy is pre-built and camera rays are pre-sorted before rendering begins. This preliminary organization establishes a deterministic data access pattern that eliminates random access during rendering. The pre-sorted rays traverse the pre-organized hierarchy in a predictable manner, maximizing data coherence and minimizing processing overhead.
Solution Approach 2:
The spatial hierarchy provides local organization of scene data at different levels and locations. Each hierarchy level and node is locally optimized for the specific camera rays that interact with it. This local quality organization ensures that data access is highly coherent and localized, avoiding random access patterns while maintaining accurate rendering results.
Data Source
AI summary
A method is provided for a streaming hierarchy traversal renderer with particular application for feature films and other demanding content creation using scenes of high complexity that cannot fit in memory. The renderer organizes scene geometry into a spatial hierarchy, generates directional queries to be traced in the spatial hierarchy, performs a streaming hierarchy traversal over the directional queries, and uses the results of the directional queries to shade or render the scene. The traversal performs a single pass over the directional queries for splitting into one child stream of directional queries for each child node at each scene node in the hierarchy. A prioritized traversal of the hierarchy may also be carried out using various cost-metrics for optimized parallelism. The rendering may also bounce the directional queries to provide multi-pass global illumination.