Interactive visualization of exceptionally complex industrial CAD datasets
Andreas Dietrich, Ingo Wald, Philipp Slusallek · 2004
Graphics hardware has dramatically evolved over the last years. Even consumer cards are able to render many million triangles per second. While this seems sufficient for most small and mid-sized scenes, many industrial CAD datasets are way to complex to be directly displayed interactively on current graphics accelerators, due to the limitations of the underlying rasterization algorithms.This project aims at interactively visualizing extremely large datasets with a software ray tracing approach. We demonstrate this using a "Boeing 777" model containing 350 million individual triangles. The model can be rendered at several frames per second including pixel-accurate shadows and highlights at full detail without any simplifications, even on a single commodity PC.