AN USER PROGRAMMABLE SYSTEM AGNOSTIC REAL-TIME RAY TRACING FRAMEWORK

Abstract

Ray tracing rendering is a well-understood rendering technique that can produce photorealistic images or complex visual effects. Until recently, customizing a ray tracing pipeline posed challenges because of the lack of infrastructure to program such a pipeline. Industries have been proposing their own ray tracing frameworks to address the customizability issue by supporting user programs integration. However, most of the existing solutions target proprietary platforms, which limits the access to ray tracing for the general public. In this project, we propose a platform-agnostic ray tracing framework that is based on the general programming capacity found in commodity graphical processing units (GPUs). The framework supports six types of customizable user programs, including custom geometries, shading, and lighting. The framework also provides the developers with utilities such as built-in acceleration structure, secondary ray generation, and material instancing. Our framework has been demonstrated that it is able to fulfill the common functional requirements found in existing commercial products without the platform limitations. We also identified tradeoffs in developing a flexible, cross-platform ray tracing framework running on GPUs. Our results provide insights into the future development of a similar ray tracing framework.