Rendering Massive Models

Marc Olano, CSEE Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
Mark Bolstad, CSEE Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering

 

Whether it is for the quest of increased visual realism in cinema, or in the processing of the latest scientific data sets, the sizes of models being rendered are becoming larger. As this trend continues, the number of elements in a single object will exceed four billion, thus requiring 64-bit data structures to reference the components of the object, and new techniques and algorithms to efficiently render the object. Currently, scenes consisting of multiple objects are approaching the 64-bit barrier. We are developing new parallel algorithms to render models of extreme complexity, designed to scale with the number of geometric primitives rather than the number of pixels or rays.