Visualization
Fraunhofer ITWM
Photo-realistic Rendering
In diverse fields of production, ranging from the automotive industry through mechanical engineering to entertainment industry the use of artificially generated, photorealistic images in recent years has steadily grown in importance. The capability to examine a future product virtually on a computer screen saves companies time and money for the production of prototypes. This is for example important for the development of new automobile models, where the costs for prototypes are immense. But this is only one type of application. The consumers' expectations to special effects in new videogames or movies is constantly increasing the demand for better and more realistic images.
Offline Quality - Real Time Speed
But together with the requirements, calculation time for the desired degree of realism increases massively. Therefore the time for the calculation of a single image today ranges from a couple of minutes up to several hours. Up to now, there are no real-time algorithms, that enable a user to navigate interactively and smoothly through photo-realistically rendered, large 3D scenes.
The Competence Center for High Performance Computing (CC HPC) at the ITWM is dealing with CPU-based ray-tracing algorithms for large-scaled triangulated 3D scenes and objects for several years. Together with our ray-tracing algorithms and some powerful volume rendering algorithms, which also have been developed at the CC HPC, some successful commercial software products could be put on the market (including Pre-Stack PRO or modules for MAGMASOFT®).
The PV-4D PBRT-Engine
The latest generation of the PV-4D PBRT Engine is now the first ray-tracing engine to bring production-quality rendered images in real-time on the screen, reducing the idle time for the user to some milliseconds. The rendering is so fast, the user can hardly recognize the calculation process between two images. So the PV-4D PBRT engine defines entirely new standards for photorealistic ray-tracing engines and stands out clearly from all its competitors.
The procedures for geometry handling in the PV-4D PBRT Engine also correspond to the absolute latest in technology (i.e. traversal of the scene, intersection tests, ...). A full HDR-pipeline, HQ texture filtering and HQ anti-aliasing that measure up even with highest needs of the user, are also part of the engine's features.
With the use of CPUs instead of GPUs, additional benefits can be attained. Thus, there is no size limitation of models, scenes and textures, as in almost every GPU-based method. A special graphics hardware is not required.
