Section: New Software and Platforms

GigaVoxels

Participants : Fabrice Neyret [contact] , Prashant Goswami, Jérémy Sinoir, Cyril Crassin, Pascal Guehl, Paul Gannay, Eric Heitz.

Soon available at http://gigavoxels.inrialpes.fr/index.htm in double licencing GPL/commercial.

Gigavoxel is a software platform initiated from the PhD work of Cyril Crassin, and currently funded by the ANR CONTINT RTIGE (Figure 5 ). The goal of this platform is the real-time quality rendering of very large and very detailed scenes which couldn't fit memory. Performances permit showing details over deep zooms and walk through very crowdy scenes (which are rigid, for the moment). The principle is to represent data on the GPU as a Sparse Voxel Octree which multiscale voxels bricks are produced on demand only when necessary and only at the required resolution, and kept in a LRU cache. User defined producer lays accross CPU and GPU and can load, transform, or procedurally create the data. Another user defined function is called to shade each voxel according to the user-defined voxel content, so that it is user choice to distribute the appearance-making at creation (for faster rendering) or on the fly (for storageless thin procedural details). The efficient rendering is done using a GPU differential cone-tracing using the scale corresponding to the 3D-MIPmapping LOD, allowing quality rendering with one single ray per pixel. Data is produced in case of cache miss, and thus only whenever visible (accounting for view frustum and occlusion). Soft-shadows and depth-of-field is easily obtained using larger cones, and are indeed cheaper than unblurred rendering. Beside the representation, data management and base rendering algorithm themself, we also worked on realtime light transport, and on quality prefiltering of complex data. Ongoing researches are addressing animation. GigaVoxels is currently used for the quality real-time exploration of the detailed galaxy in ANR RTIGE. This work led to several publications and several licences have been sold to companies.

Figure 5. GigaVoxels freely downloadable demo.