An Efficient Technology of Real-Time Modeling of Height Field Surface on the Ray Tracing Pipeline

In this paper, based on height field surface example, an efficient technology of real-time modeling of complex procedural objects on the ray tracing pipeline (RT-pipeline) is proposed. The proposed technology doesn’t overload the I-shader stage (intersection shader), but distributes the computational load between the I-shader and the AH-shader (any-hit shader). The key innovations of the technology are the early rejection at the I-shader stage of the bounding boxes (AABBs) extracted by the RT-pipeline hardware unit, and the “transparent AABB” concept which allows transferring costly computing of the “ray-procedural object” intersection to a later AH-shader stage. The paper also describes a number of modifications that reduce the amount of such calculations. The proposed technology was implemented in a software complex in C++, GLSL and using the Vulkan API. The performance of the developed solution was studied under various ray tracing conditions on the task of modeling the surface of a detailed Puget Sound height field. The obtained results confirmed efficiency of the developed technology and the possibility of its application in virtual environment systems, simulators, scientific visualization, etc.