US 7,479,960 B2 · Object visibility control for ray tracing

Abstract

A computer graphics method and apparatus allows designer control over the rendering of objects and scenes, in a rendering system using ray tracing for example. A modeling system is adapted to accept rules for controlling how certain objects affect the appearance of certain other objects. In a ray tracing implementation, rules are specified by ray type and can be specified as either “including” all but certain objects or “excluding” specific objects for any given object. A rendering system extracts these rules from a bytestream or other input including other graphics data and instructions, and populates lists for internal use by other components of the rendering system. A ray tracer in the rendering system is adapted to consult the list when performing ray tracing, so as to enforce the rendering control specified by the content creator when the objects and scene are rendered.

Claims64

Dependent claims

A method of ray tracing for a graphics rendering system, the method comprising:

identifying a ray-object intersection point on an object, the object having associated object visibility rules;
processing with a processor, each of a plurality of rays associated with the ray-object intersection point in accordance with the object visibility rules, wherein the object visibility rules specify whether to selectively exclude the contribution of each of the rays to a rendered image based on each of the ray's intersections with other objects identified by the object visibility rules;
and
generating a digital image based on the processing.

1 more element

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.

Object visibility control for ray tracing

Life of this patent

Object visibility control for ray tracing

Life of this patent

Abstract

Claims64