A real-time refraction renderer for volume objects using a polygon-rendering scheme

Abstract

We propose the per vertex ray tracing (pVRT) method for real-time refraction rendering and discuss its algorithm, hardware implementation, and results. Our algorithm is based on single-pass rendering with a pre-processing phase to calculate the destinations of rays passing through transparent volume objects. In the pre-processing process, the direction and position of a ray's destination, which is the point at which a ray, after passing through a transparent object, intersects with an image frame, are calculated for each object independently, and objects made from refractive materials are rendered by using the computed addresses in the image buffer where the non-transparent objects are rendered. This method will be implemented entirely in hardware, and a performance evaluation based on software simulation showed an average calculation speed of 458907 polygon/sec. (241530 vertex/sec) in the pre-processing process.