Real-Time Ray Tracing of Complex Molecular Scenes

Abstract—Molecular visualization is one of the cornerstones in structural bioinformatics and related fields. Today, rasteri-zation is typically used for the interactive display of molecular scenes, while ray tracing aims at generating high-quality images, taking typically minutes to hours to generate and requiring the usage of an external off-line program. Recently, real-time ray tracing evolved to combine the interactivity of rasterization-based approaches with the superb image quality of ray tracing techniques. We demonstrate how real-time ray tracing integrated into a molecular modelling and visualization tool allows for better understanding of the structural arrangement of biomolecules and natural creation of publication-quality images in real-time. However, unlike most approaches, our technique naturaly integrates into the full-featured molecular modelling and vi-sualization tool BALLView, seamlessly extending a standard workflow with interactive high-quality rendering. Keywords-structural bioinformatics; ray tracing; molecular modeling; rendering; visualization; ray casting I