Ray Tracing Checkerboard Rendering in Molecular Visualization

Abstract

Using advanced ray tracing technology in molecular visualization to render images can greatly enhance researchers' observation and perception of molecular structure.However,existing ray tracing methods have the problems of insufficient real-time performance and poor rendering quality.In this paper,a ray tracing checkerboard rendering method is proposed.The ray tracing method is optimized by using the checkerboard rendering technology.The process of the proposed method is divided into four phases:reprojection,rendering,reconstruction and hole filling.In these phases,improvements to the checkerboard rendering are proposed,including forward reprojection,molecular shading bounding box,dynamic image reconstruction and eight-neighbor interpolation hole filling strategy.The experiment in this paper is carried out on 6 molecules with different atomic numbers.Experimental results of the comparison between the proposed method and the current advanced methods on supercomputers show that the real-time frame rate of our method is significantly higher than that of the Tachyon-OSPRay method based on CPU calculation,which is 1.58 times to 1.86 times that of the Tachyon-OSPRay method.Moreover,the proposed method has better frame rate performance than the Tachyon-Optix method based on GPU-accelerated calculation under the condition of relatively few atoms.

Keywords

• molecular visualization|molecular rendering|ray tracing|checkerboard rendering|temporal antialiasing