Distributed ray tracing for rendering LIDAR geospatial data

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