Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

This chapter provides background information and definitions for terms used throughout this book.

We define a ray, show how to use ray intervals, and demonstrate how to specify a ray using DirectX Raytracing (DXR).

Modern graphics APIs such as DirectX 12 expose low-level hardware access and control to developers, often resulting in complex and verbose code that can be intimidating for novices. In this chapter, we hope to demystify the steps to set up and use DirectX for ray tracing.

This chapter presents a camera implementation for high-quality interactive ray tracing of planetarium dome master images using an azimuthal equidistant projection. Ray tracing is aptly suited for implementing a wide variety of special panoramic and stereoscopic projections without sacrificing image quality. This camera implementation supports antialiasing, depth of field focal blur, and circular stereoscopic projections, all effects that are difficult to produce with high quality using conventional rasterization and image warping.

This chapter explores the following problem: given an array A of N numbers Ai, how can we efficiently query the minimal or maximal numbers in any sub-range of the array? For example, “what is the minimum of the 8th to the 23rd elements?”

We present a solution to avoid self-intersections in ray tracing that is more robust than current common practices while introducing minimal overhead and requiring no parameter tweaking.

The traditional quadratic formula is often presented as the way to compute the intersection of a ray with a sphere. While mathematically correct, this factorization can be numerically unstable when using floating-point arithmetic. We give two little-known reformulations and show how each can improve precision.

We find intersections between a ray and a nonplanar bilinear patch using simple geometrical constructs. The new algorithm improves the state of the art performance by over 6× and is faster than approximating a patch with two triangles.

Multi-hit ray traversal is a class of ray traversal algorithm that finds one or more, and possibly all, primitives intersected by a ray, ordered by point of intersection. Multi-hit traversal generalizes traditional first-hit ray traversal and is useful in computer graphics and physics-based simulation. We present several possible multi-hit implementations using Microsoft DirectX Raytracing and explore the performance of these implementations in an example GPU ray tracer.

This chapter describes an image partitioning scheme that can be used to distribute the work of computing pixel values across multiple processing units. The resulting workload distribution scheme is simple to implement, yet effective.