Comparison of Acceleration Data Structures for High Quality Fast Reflections of Static and Deformable Models in Walkthrough Animations

Abstract

In order to render realistic images, the reflectance of surfaces must be simulated accurately. Generally, the ray tracing rendering technique is used to make a material reflect its surroundings, since it represents with great fidelity the behavior of light. However, ray tracing is still a very costly algorithm, so far mostly indicated in offline rendering scenarios. This situation is even more challenging for scenes containing 3D deformable meshes, since their geometry and, thus, the acceleration structures used, need to be updated in each frame of the animation. In this paper, we present an extended version of our hybrid algorithm that combines rasterization and a pure ray tracing through the NVIDIA OptiX to render high quality fast reflections, including scenes with deformable models. Additionally, we analyze and compare the performances of different NVIDIA OptiX acceleration data structures for generating reflections of static and deformable models in walkthrough animations. The results show that NVIDIA OptiX acceleration structures reach high frames per second for static objects. However, there is a performance decay in terms of frames per second when dealing with deformable models, since it becomes necessary to update the acceleration structures to cope with changing geometry, but even under these restrictions, we were able to achieve interactive frame rates.