Fast Ray Tracing of Trimmed NURBS Surfaces on a GPU for Industrial Applications
, Professor, Czech Technical University in Prague
, Assistant Professor, Czech Technical University in Prague
Ray tracing of trimmed non-uniform rational basis spline (NURBS) surfaces is a must in the CAD industry, and has been widely applied in 3D modeling software. While most CAD software uses tessellation followed by rasterization to display surfaces, we show the performance of the 3D models by ray tracing can reach real-time performance even for large-scale models. We show the performance of ray tracing can reach from 50 to 1,000 mega rays per second for primary and random rays on the contemporary GPU RTX 3090, depending on the scene complexity between 10K to 1800K NURBS surfaces and 37K to 10,000K of trimming NURBS curves. We utilize the computing power of the GPU and new algorithmic ideas to accelerate the trimming in parametric space. The achieved performance of the ray tracing engine can be used for non-trivial rendering of high-quality images, including the global illumination with interactive and real-time rates.