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Abstract:
Computer aided design (CAD) and virtual reality (VR) are
becoming increasingly important tools for industrial design
applications. Unfortunately, there is a huge and growing gap
between what data CAD engineers are working on, what
rendering quality is needed by designers and executives to
faithfully judge a design variant, and what rendering
capabilities are offered by commonly available VR
frameworks. In particular, existing VR systems cannot
currently cope with the accuracy demanded by CAD engineers,
nor can they deliver the photo-realistic rendering quality
and reliability required by designers and decision makers.
In this paper, we describe a ray tracing based virtual
reality framework that closes these gaps. In particular, the
proposed system supports direct ray tracing of trimmed
freeform surfaces even for complex models of thousands of
patches, allows for accurately simulating reflections and
refraction for glass and car paint effects, offers support
for direct integration of measured materials via
bidirectional texture functions, and even allows for soft
environmental lighting from high dynamic range environment
maps. All of these effects can be delivered interactively,
and are demonstrated on a real-world industrial model, a
complete Mercedes C-Class car.
