Moved!

Interactive Out-of-Core Ray Casting of Massive Triangular Models with Voxel-Based LODs

If you’re interested in the technical details of my massive model rendering method, I suggest that you check out this paper, which I presented about a month ago at the Fifth Hungarian Conference on Computer Graphics and Geometry.

Please leave a comment in case you have any questions or thoughts about my work!

Mandelbulb walkthrough with VoxLOD

354 million triangles
Recorded in real-time on a Core 2 Duo T5500

Since I couldn’t find any publicly available, truly huge data sets, I’ve written a simple triangle model generator, which extracts an isosurface of a procedural scalar field. I’ve used this program to generate the detailed Mandelbulb fractal model shown in the video. So far, this is the most complex data set I’ve tested VoxLOD with. Unfortunately, it’s too artificial. I would be really grateful if somebody could provide me with a real-world massive model!

XYZ RGB Dragon walkthrough with VoxLOD

7 million triangles
Recorded in real-time on a Core 2 Quad Q9300

Power Plant walkthrough with VoxLOD

12 million triangles
Recorded in real-time on a Core 2 Quad Q9300

VoxLOD screenshots

For the last year or so, I’ve been working on a real-time massive model visualization engine called VoxLOD, which can handle data sets consisting of hundreds of millions of triangles.

It is based on ray casting/tracing and employs a voxel-based LOD framework. The original triangles and the voxels are stored in a compressed out-of-core data structure, so it’s possible to explore huge models that cannot be completely loaded into the system memory. Data is fetched asynchronously to hide the I/O latency. Currently, the renderer runs entirely on the CPU.

Stay tuned for further details and updates!

My name is Attila Tamás Áfra, and currently, I am a computer science Master’s student at Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. My main professional interests are in 3D graphics, image/video processing and parallel computing. This is a technical blog mostly about these topics.