Realtime Ray Tracing

0Stephan • 3rd Jan 2010 • Portfolio

Within the context of my Diploma thesis I developed an open source ray tracing library named rapido. It provides ray tracing support for static and dynamic geometry and aims to deliver real–time frame rates for scenes with up to 1 million triangles on then current hardware (2008).

rapido has been used in a number of applications, such as an implementation of the BART benchmark for animated scenes and a viewer for maps from Raven Software’s game Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force. Furthermore it powers a ray tracing based rendering backend for the ioquake3 engine, which enables ray traced graphics in games like id Software’s Quake 3 Arena and Raven Software’s Elite Force. This rendering backend relies on the LLVM for dynamic generation of shading code, which I presented at the IEEE Symposium on Interactive Raytracing with my contribution Run-Time Code Generation for Materials.

rapido is written in C/C++ and is available for download at SourceForge.net. The library was released as free software under the terms of the BSD License. The design choices, the implementation, and benchmark data are discussed in detail in my Diploma thesis.

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