Improved visual appearance of a 3d scene

The computing power of modern desktop graphic cards can be utilized to improve dramatically the visual results for a 3D scene displayed in your 3D applications. Real-time ray tracing algorithm offered by OPEN CASCADE is the solution when you need order-independent transparency, sharp shadows, light refraction and specular inter-object reflections inside an application while preserving interactive frame rates.

Real-time ray tracing is applicable to many use cases where OpenGL rasterization is used traditionally – to gain better performance (visualization of very large tessellations) or to improve the user experience (better perception of a 3D scene).

On the other hand, our real-time ray tracing solution is flexible and generic and can be adapted to wide range of input data types where traditional rasterization cannot be used. One example is on-the-fly surface reconstruction from a point cloud or a scalar field without tessellation. This approach was implemented by OPEN CASCADE in a visualization solution for realistic visualization of Smoothed Particles Hydrodynamics (SPH) simulation results calculated by GPUSPH solver (http://www.gpusph.org/).

This is also an example of a combined rendering solution: photo-realistic rendering is used to visualize all scene elements (a fluid, solid objects like walls and obstacles, environment) with photographic quality, while volume rendering is used to show the local characteristics of the fluid (pressure, velocity, etc.) with color. Open CASCADE customers can benefit from such a flexible rendering architecture and mix various rendering algorithms and input data in one 3D scene.