Distributed ray tracing for rendering LIDAR geospatial data

Diplomska naloga predstavi način upodabljanja slike s pomočjo sledenja žarkov, nekaj povezanih metod, arhitekturo interaktivnega ter porazdeljenega upodabljanja in sprotno nalaganje in pomnenje delov sveta. Upodablja se tridimenzionalne virtualne svetove igre Minecraft in svet, zgrajen iz oblakov točk laserskega skeniranja Slovenije. Oblaki točk so prostorsko zahtevni in v težko dostopni obliki, zato je bila razvita skripta za prenos in pretvorbo podatkov. Za hitrejšo in lažjo obdelavo podatkov je bil implementiran strežnik, ki na zahtevo v več korakih pretvori točke v obliko sveta, primerno za sledilnik. Raziskanih je bilo nekaj parametrov sledilnika in strežnika. Na koncu so prikazane še različne upodobitve, pridobljene s pomočjo omenjenih programov.This thesis presents a way of rendering images through the use of ray tracing, some related methods, a highly parallel and interactive rendering architecture and on-demand world loading and caching. The ray tracer supports rendering three-dimensional voxel worlds from the Minecraft video game and a world created from a laser-scanned point cloud data set of Slovenia. Since this data demands a lot of storage space and is in an inconvenient format, a script that downloads and converts the required resources was developed. Additionally, an HTTP server was implemented for faster processing and easier data access. The ray tracer requires a specific world format, which can be generated on-demand by the server from the converted point clouds through multiple processing steps. The effects of a few configurable ray tracer and HTTP server parameters were explored. A few renders obtained through the aforementioned programs and tools are shown at the end