The project aimed to expand the existing system for planning and previewing prefabricated houses (Vi2000) by a path tracing renderer. The renderer had to provide realistic illumination effects in a scene like diffuse interreflections between surfaces. To ensure real-time frame rates for an interactive preview, we utilized screen space methods to approximate realistic illumination effects on a post-processing basis. For the path tracing part, we deployed a hierarchical parallel computing approach. The approach distributed render-tasks to several render servers. Each server provided a set of reasonably-priced consumer GPUs.
The physically-based renderer, as well as the screen-space renderer, were attached to the Vi2000 software by an interface for cluster-based rendering. This enabled the users to experience their new homes in advance on a new level of realism.
This work was funded by the BMWi, ZlM grant no. KF2644106ED1.