Real-time dynamic reflections for realistic rendering of 3D scenes

Visual effects, such as real-time dynamic reflections, are fundamental for realistic rendering of 3D scenes and walkthrough animations containing multiple moving objects, since they provide the correct identification of their relative distance and of their material properties, generating a closer perception of reality. Most rendering algorithms that generate realistic effects are quite expensive, such as ray tracing, usually used in offline rendering. This paper presents a solution for generating reflections, that we have developed with a real-time hybrid algorithm for rendering rigid objects in realistic dynamic scenes. The algorithm combines rasterization, the screen space reflection (SSR) technique, with pure GPU-ray tracing algorithm through deferred rendering pipeline, doing SSR per pixel and creating a mask with failed pixels to apply ray tracing for those pixels instead. The results demonstrate a significant improvement in performance with a very little perceptual loss in quality of our hybrid algorithm, when compared to the full ray tracing solution. In terms of FPS results, our hybrid solution remains positioned (most of the time) in between the SSR and the pure ray tracing’s methods, during the walkthrough. Besides, it scales quite well for realistic dynamic scenes with 3D rigid objects.