Dynamic Update of Sparse Voxel Octree Based on Morton Code

Yucong Pan, Purdue University

Abstract

Real-time global illumination has been a very important topic and is widely used in game industry. Previous offline rendering requires a large amount of time to converge and reduce the noise generated in Monte Carlo method. Thus, it cannot be easily adapted in real-time rendering. Using voxels in the field of global illumination has become a popular approach. While a naïve voxel grid occupies huge memory in video card, a data structure called sparse voxel octree is often implemented in order to reduce memory cost of voxels and achieve efficient ray casting performance in an interactive frame rate. However, rendering of voxels can cause block effects due to the nature of voxel. One solution is to increase the resolution of voxel so that one voxel is smaller than a pixel on screen. But this is usually not feasible because higher resolution results in higher memory consumption. Thus, most of the global illumination methods of SVO (sparse voxel octree) only use it in visibility test and radiance storage, rather than render it directly. Previous research has tried to incorporate SVO in ray tracing, radiosity methods and voxel cone tracing, and all achieved real-time frame rates in complex scenes. However, most of them only focus on static scenes and does not consider dynamic updates of SVO and the influence of it on performance. In this thesis, we will discuss the tradeoff of multiple classic real-time global illumination methods and their implementations using SVO. We will also propose an efficient approach to dynamic update SVO in animated scenes. The deliverables will be implemented in CUDA 11.0 and OpenGL.

Degree

M.Sc.

Advisors

McGraw, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Computer science

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