Efficient Particle Volume Splatting in a Ray Tracer

Rendering of particle data sets is a common problem in many domains including games, film, and scientific visualization. Conventionally, this has been accomplished using rasterization-based splatting methods, which scale linearly with respect to problem size. Given sufficiently low-cost ray traversal with logarithmic complexity, splatting within a ray tracing framework could scale better to larger geometry. In this chapter, we provide a method for efficiently rendering larger particle data, exploiting ray coherence and leveraging hardware-accelerated traversal on architectures such as the NVIDIA RTX 2080 Ti (Turing) GPUs with RT Cores technology.