Hardware-accelerated point-based rendering of surfaces and volumes

In this paper, we present a fast GPU-based algorithm for ray-tracing point-based models, which includes an efficient computation of secondary and shadow rays, contrary to previous work which supported ray-surface intersections for primary rays only. Volumetric effects are added to the models by means of scattered data interpolation in order to combine point-based surface and volume rendering in the same scene. This allows us to obtain effects such as refraction within volumetric objects. The flexibility of our method is demonstrated by combining shadows, textured objects, refraction and volumetric effects in the same scene comprised uniquely by point sets