Date of Award
8-2009
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Legacy Department
Computer Science
Committee Chair/Advisor
Geist, Robert M
Committee Member
Westall , James M
Committee Member
Duchowski , Andrew T
Committee Member
Woodard , Damon L
Abstract
Real-time rendering of large-scale, forest ecosystems remains
a challenging problem, in that important global illumination effects,
such as leaf transparency and inter-object light scattering, are
difficult to capture, given tight timing constraints and scenes
that typically contain hundreds of millions of primitives.
We propose a new lighting model, adapted from
a model previously used to light convective clouds and other
participating media,
together with GPU ray tracing, in order to achieve these global illumination
effects while maintaining near real-time performance. The lighting
model is based on a lattice-Boltzmann method in which
reflectance, transmittance, and absorption parameters are
taken from measurements of real plants. The lighting model
is solved as a preprocessing step, requires only
seconds on a single GPU, and allows
dynamic lighting changes at run-time.
The ray tracing engine,
which runs on one or multiple GPUs,
combines multiple acceleration structures to achieve
near real-time performance for large, complex scenes.
Both the preprocessing
step and the ray tracing engine make extensive use of
NVIDIA's Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA).
Recommended Citation
Steele, Jay, "Fast Rendering of Forest Ecosystems with Dynamic Global Illumination" (2009). All Dissertations. 398.
https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/all_dissertations/398