Rendering Small Things: Hardware Micromaps and Particles

In computer graphics, there are numerous aspects that must be considered when rendering images of virtual scenes:

What physical light-generating phenomena do we care about? How should object and material surfaces be described? And how should these be stored to ensure as fast and efficient image rendering as possible?

As a part of this thesis, a method for rendering images of scenes lit by virtual atomic particles traveling at superluminal speeds is presented that handles both the particle interactions and light generation in a unified ray-tracing framework.

However, this form of ray-tracing can be very time-consuming. Thus, this work includes an investigation into accelerating one aspect of this process: Parallelizing the construction of the spatial split bounding volume hierarchy in a simple and straightforward way with the OpenMP framework.

A similar ray-tracing process is then optimized for real-time rendering of partially-transparent triangle meshes by efficiently leveraging and compressing a structure known as micromaps that enables ray-tracing to work more efficiently for various alpha-masked geometries such as grass and foliage.

This structure is subsequently generalized and extended to arbitrary surface attributes, with a thorough analysis of its performance, quality trade-offs, and potential future use-cases in the hardware accelerated real-time ray-tracing pipeline.