Abstract
Recent high-performance ray tracing implementations have already achieved interactive performance on a single PC even for highly complex scenes. However, so far these approaches have been limited to mostly static scenes due to the high cost of updating the necessary spatial index structures after modifying scene geometry. In this paper, we present an approach that avoids these updates almost completely for the case of skinned models as typically used in computer games. We assume that the characters are built from meshes with an underlying skeleton structure, where the set of joint angles defines the character’s pose and determines the skinning parameters. Based on a sampling of the possible pose space we build a static fuzzy kd-tree for each skeleton segment in a fast preprocessing step. This fuzzy kd-tree is then organized into a top-level kd-tree. Together with the skeleton’s affine transformations this multi-level kd-tree allows fast and efficient scene traversal at runtime, while arbitrary combinations of animation sequences can be applied interactively to the joint angles. We achieve a real-time ray tracing performance of up to 15 frames per second at 1024×1024 resolution even on a single processor core.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Amanatides, J., Woo, A.: A fast voxel traversal algorithm for ray tracing. In: Proceedings of Eurographics, pp. 3–10. Eurographics Association (1987)
Appel, A.: Some techniques for shading machine renderings of solids. In: AF/PS Conference Proceedings (Springer Joint Computer Conference), vol. 32, pp. 37–45. Thompson Book Company, Washington, DC (1968)
ATI: The ATI homepage. http://www.ati.com/
Cal3D: 3D character animation library. https://gna.org/projects/cal3d/
Carr, N.A., Hoberock, J., Crane, K., Hart, J.C.: Fast GPU ray tracing of dynamic meshes using geometry images. In: Proceedings of Graphics Interface. A.K. Peters, Wellesley, MA (2006)
Cleary, J., Wyvill, B., Birtwistle, G., Vatti, R.: A parallel ray tracing computer. In: Proceedings of the Association of Simula Users Conference, pp. 77–80. Canadian Information Processing Society, Mississauge, ON (1983)
Foley, T., Sugerman, J.: KD-tree acceleration structures for a GPU raytracer. In: HWWS ’05 Proceedings, pp. 15–22. ACM Press, New York (2005)
Glassner, A.S.: Space subdivision for fast ray tracing. IEEE Comput. Graph. Appl. 4(10), 15–22 (1984)
Goodnight, N., Wang, R., Woolley, C., Humphreys, G.: Interactive time-dependent tone mapping using programmable graphics hardware. In: P.H. Christensen, D. Cohen-Or (eds.) Proceedings of the 2003 Eurographics Symposium on Rendering, pp. 26–37. Eurographics Association, Aire-la-Ville, Switzerland (2003)
Günther, J., Friedrich, H., Wald, I., Seidel, H.P., Slusallek, P.: Ray tracing animated scenes using motion decomposition. Comput. Graph. Forum 25(3) (2006). (Proceedings of Eurographics) (to appear, preprint available at http://www.mpi-inf.mpg.de/∼guenther/modecomp/)
Havran, V.: Heuristic Ray Shooting Algorithms. Ph.D. thesis, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Czech Technical University in Prague (2001)
Havran, V., Prikryl, J., Purgathofer, W.: Statistical comparison of ray-shooting efficiency schemes. Tech. Rep. TR-186-2-00-14, Department of Computer Science, Czech Technical University; Vienna University of Technology (2000)
Intel Corp.: Intel Pentium III Streaming SIMD Extensions. http://developer.intel.com/vtune/cbts/simd.htm (2002)
Jansen, F.W.: Data structures for ray tracing. In: Proceedings of the Workshop on Data structures for Raster Graphics, pp. 57–73. Springer, New York, NY (1986)
Lauterbach, C., Yoon, S.E., Tuft, D., Manocha, D.: RT-DEFORM Interactive Ray tracing of dynamic scenes using BVHs. Technical Report TR06-010, Department of Computer Science University of North Carolina (2006)
Lext, J., Akenine-Möller, T.: Towards rapid reconstruction for animated ray tracing. In: Eurographics 2001 – Short Presentations, pp. 311–318 (2001)
Lext, J., Assarsson, U., Möller, T.: BART: A benchmark for animated ray tracing. Tech. Rep., Department of Computer Engineering, Chalmers University of Technology, Göteborg, Sweden (2000)
MacDonald, J.D., Booth, K.S.: Heuristics for ray tracing using space subdivision. In: Proceedings of Graphics Interface, pp. 152–63. A.K. Peters, Wellesley, MA (1989)
Magnenat-Thalmann, N., Laperrière, R., Thalmann, D.: Joint-dependent local deformations for hand animation and object grasping. In: Proceedings of Graphics Interface ’88, pp. 26–33. Canadian Information Processing Society, Toronto, Ont., Canada (1988)
Magnenat-Thalmann, N., Thalmann, D.: Human body deformations using joint-dependent local operators and finite-element theory, pp. 243–262. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco, CA (1991)
Pharr, M., Humphreys, G.: Physically Based Rendering: From Theory to Implementation. Morgan Kaufman, San Francisco, CA (2004)
Reinhard, E., Smits, B., Hansen, C.: Dynamic acceleration structures for interactive ray tracing. In: Proceedings of the Eurographics Workshop on Rendering, pp. 299–306. Brno, Czech Republic (2000)
Reshetov, A., Soupikov, A., Hurley, J.: Multi-level ray tracing algorithm. ACM Trans. Graph. 24(3), 1176–1185 (2005)
Rubin, S.M., Whitted, T.: A three-dimensional representation for fast rendering of complex scenes. Comput. Graph. 14(3), 110–116 (1980)
Schmittler, J., Wald, I., Slusallek, P.: SaarCOR – A hardware architecture for ray tracing. In: Proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Conference on Graphics Hardware, pp. 27–36 (2002)
Wächter, C., Keller, A.: Instant ray tracing: The bounding interval hierarchy. In: Rendering Techniques 2006, Proceedings of the Eurographics Symposium on Rendering (2006)
Wald, I.: Realtime Ray Tracing and Interactive Global Illumination. Ph.D. thesis, Computer Graphics Group, Saarland University (2004)
Wald, I., Benthin, C., Slusallek, P.: Distributed interactive ray tracing of dynamic scenes. In: Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Parallel and Large-Data Visualization and Graphics (PVG), pp. 77–86 (2003)
Wald, I., Boulos, S., Shirley, P.: Ray tracing deformable scenes using dynamic bounding volume hierarchies. SCI Institute Technical Report UUSCI-2006-015, University of Utah (2006)
Wald, I., Havran, V.: On building fast kd-trees for ray tracing, and on doing that in O(NlogN). In: Proceedings of the 2006 IEEE Symposium on Interactive Ray Tracing (2006)
Wald, I., Ize, T., Kensler, A., Knoll, A., Parker, S.G.: Ray tracing animated scenes using coherent grid traversal. ACM Trans. Graph. 25(3), 485–493 (2006)
Wald, I., Slusallek, P., Benthin, C., Wagner, M.: Interactive rendering with coherent ray tracing. Comput. Graph. Forum 20(3), 153–164 (2001)
Woop, S., Marmitt, G., Slusallek, P.: B-kd trees for hardware accelerated ray tracing of dynamic scenes. In: Proceedings of Graphics Hardware (2006), to appear
Woop, S., Schmittler, J., Slusallek, P.: RPU: A Programmable ray processing unit for realtime ray tracing. In: Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH, vol. 24(3), pp. 434–444. ACM Press, New York, NY, USA (2005)
Yoon, S.E., Manocha, D.: Cache-efficient layouts of bounding volume hierarchies. Comput. Graph. Forum 25(3) (2006), to appear
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Electronic Supplementary Material
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Günther, J., Friedrich, H., Seidel, HP. et al. Interactive ray tracing of skinned animations. Visual Comput 22, 785–792 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00371-006-0063-x
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00371-006-0063-x