Visualization of Hybrid Virtual Scenes Using Hardware-Accelerated Ray Tracing and Rasterization

This paper discusses the task of real-time visualization of hybrid virtual scenes that combine traditional polygonal scenes and procedural objects. An approach to solve this task on modern multicore graphics processors is proposed, in which the visualization of the polygonal scene is performed via rasterization and non-polygonal procedural objects - using hardware-accelerated ray tracing. The paper describes developed methods and algorithms allowing two such synthesized images to be merged by depth using the bundle of programming interfaces Vulkan-OpenGL. Based on the proposed methods and algorithms, software complex prototype, implementing real-time visualization of hybrid scenes, was created. The complex was tested on a number of scenes with complicated procedural objects specified by 3D scalar fields (point clouds). The results of the approbation confirmed the feasibility of obtained solutions and their applicability to virtual environment systems, scientific visualization, virtual laboratories, video simulators, educational applications, etc.