Skipping Spheres: SDF Scaling & Early Ray Termination for Fast Sphere Tracing

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dc.contributor.authorPolychronakis, Andreasen_US
dc.contributor.authorKoulieris, George Alexen_US
dc.contributor.authorMania, Katerinaen_US
dc.contributor.editorHunter, Daviden_US
dc.contributor.editorSlingsby, Aidanen_US
dc.date.accessioned2024-09-09T05:44:56Z
dc.date.available2024-09-09T05:44:56Z
dc.date.issued2024
dc.description.abstractThis paper presents a rapid rendering pipeline for sphere tracing Signed Distance Functions (SDFs), showcasing a notable boost in performance compared to the current state-of-the-art. Existing methods endeavor to reduce the ray step count by adjusting step size using heuristics or by rendering multiple intermediate lower-resolution buffers to pre-calculate non-salient pixels at reduced quality. However, the accelerated performance with low-resolution buffers often introduces artifacts compared to fully sphere-traced scenes, especially for smaller features, which might go unnoticed altogether. Our approach significantly reduces steps compared to prior work while minimising artifacts. We accomplish this based on two key observations and by employing a single low-resolution buffer: Firstly, we perform SDF scaling in the low-resolution buffer, effectively enlarging the footprint of the implicit surfaces when rendered in low resolution, ensuring visibility of all SDFs. Secondly, leveraging the low-resolution buffer rendering, we detect when a ray converges to high-cost surface edges and can terminate sphere tracing earlier than usual, further reducing step count. Our method achieves a substantial performance improvement (exceeding 3× in certain scenes) compared to previous approaches, while minimizing artifacts, as demonstrated in our visual fidelity evaluation.en_US
dc.description.sectionheaders3D Rendering and Virtual Reality (VR)
dc.description.seriesinformationComputer Graphics and Visual Computing (CGVC)
dc.identifier.doi10.2312/cgvc.20241219
dc.identifier.isbn978-3-03868-249-3
dc.identifier.pages9 pages
dc.identifier.urihttps://doi.org/10.2312/cgvc.20241219
dc.identifier.urihttps://diglib.eg.org/handle/10.2312/cgvc20241219
dc.publisherThe Eurographics Associationen_US
dc.rightsAttribution 4.0 International License
dc.rights.urihttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
dc.subjectCCS Concepts: Computing methodologies → Rendering
dc.subjectComputing methodologies → Rendering
dc.titleSkipping Spheres: SDF Scaling & Early Ray Termination for Fast Sphere Tracingen_US
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