CSS552 Final Project

Ray Tracing Height Fields

By

Aran Shirdavani and Frank Ow

Problem

The problem is to create a realistic looking terrain, simulating earth, a rock, planetoid, or any other natural rocky formation without having to actually plot thousands of vertices by hand. Traditional Ray Tracing for Terrain is first creating the 3D Mesh and ray tracing each triangle on the 3D Mesh. This will be expensive to generate a large terrain image.

Solution

The solution is to calculate realistic looking terrain by using Height Fields. By using the Height Fields method we can skip to create 3D Mesh in process of generate a terrain image.  We have using 2 methods to carry out this project.

1. We divided the whole area of terrain into 4 different sections and tested the ray tracing for intersection to those sections. Than we continue to divide Hit area into another 4 different sections for more test until we can’t divide the area into small section.  

2. We pre-calculate the whole area of terrain into different level of sections. Example: 1 level into 4 sections, 2 level into 16 sections and etc. With this method we can skip to generate the section and bounding volumes in each pixel calculation. We have tested this project with this method compare to same project without apply this method. The project without pre-calculate took about 10 minutes to finish generate a terrain image. The same project with pre-calculate took only 50 seconds to finish generate the same terrain image.

Result

Reference:

Huamin Qu, Feng Qiu, Nan Zhang, Arie Kaufman and MinWan. Ray Tracing Height Fields. Center for Visual Computing and Department of Computer Science State University of New York at Stony Brook, Stony Brook, Ny 11794-4400 The Boeing Company, P.O. Box 3707, M/C 7L-40, Seattle,WA 98124-2207