Efficient ray tracing of complex natural scenes*

In this paper we present a method for the consistent modelling and efficient ray tracing of complex natural scenes. Both plants and terrains are modelled and represented in the same way to allow mutual influences of their appearance and interdependencies of their geometry. Plants are generated together with a fractal terrain, so that they directly grow on it. This allows an accurate calculation of reflections and the cast of shadows. The scenes are modeled with a special kind of PL-Systems and are represented by cyclic object-instancing graphs. This is a very compact representation for ray tracing, which avoids restrictions to the complexity of the scenes. To significantly increase the efficiency of ray tracing with this representation an adaptation of conventional optimization techniques to cyclic graphs is necessary. In this paper we introduce methods for the calculation of a bounding box hierarchy and the use of a regular 3d-grid for cyclic graphs.