OpenGI
An Extensible Framework for High Performance Global Illumination
OpenGI (short for Open Global Illumination) is an object-oriented software framework for high performance global illumination. It is used as a basis for research in the field of photorealistic rendering of complex dynamic scenes on massively parallel hardware and also for lectures and student projects. The current state of the project and recent demos can be found here.
Publications
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T. Schiffer. A Parallel Geometry Core For High Performance Ray Tracing. Diploma Thesis, Technical University Graz, 2008
Raytracing is a widely used image synthesis technique with high computational costs. Modern graphics hardware not only offers enormous parallel computation power but also a fexible programming model. In this thesis CUDA, NVidia's new API for general purpose computations on graphics hardware, and its applications to ray tracing are discussed. A parallel ray tracing system based on CUDA is developed, which has a modular design and provides an extensible set of objects for scene modeling. The ray tracing system is based on a parallel geometry core, that exploits computation power of graphics hardware to perform geometric calculations. Test results show that the CUDA raytracer delivers almost interactive frame rates for scenes containing millions of geometric primitives. |
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T. Schiffer, A. Schiefer, R. Berndt, T. Ullrich, V. Settgast and D. Fellner. Enlightened By The Web. In At 5. Multimediakongress Wismar, Wismar, Deutschland, 2010.
The design process becomes more and more virtual. New products, from small to big are created as 3D models. Buildings are planed in detail and can be visited long before the actual construction starts. In order to get a comprehensive impression of a virtual object, photo-realistic renderings transfer them into the real world. A typical virtual reality system uses prelighted 3D models. With stereo projection and head tracking it is possible to experience the virtual object as if it was already built. But during the planing and the design phase, many changes are performed, different views and constellations are tested. Since the prelighting of each instance (in an off-line process) takes too much time and prevents a fast progress, it is important to combine interactive design tools and visualization setups with a real-time, high-quality rendering system. This system has to be flexible in terms of user experience and different visualization setups. In this article we present such a system. Based on the scene graph framework OpenSG, we implemented a web-service oriented front-end and a real-time ray-tracing renderer as back-end. The web-service (a RESTful service which maps the structure of a scene graph to URLs) translates HTTP commands (GET, PUT, POST, DELETE) to scene graph operations and the rendering back-end provides realistic visualizations in real-time. |
