New Scalable Simd-Based Ray Caster Implementation For Virtual Machining

We present a highly efficient ray casting system for the visualization of subtractive manufacturing, combining state-of-the-art results of various active research fields. Besides popular techniques like acceleration structures, coherent traversal and frustum culling, we integrated the novel surface cell evaluation (SCE) algorithm, allowing the elimination of surfaces that have no effect on the final workpiece's shape. Thus, our ray caster allows an interactive, non-approximate visualization of thousands of Boolean subtraction operations between a stock and arbitrary triangular swept volumes. Compared to image-space based approaches for virtual machining, such as z-maps [3], dexels [4] or layered depth images [10], our scalable SIMD-based implementation offers a higher rendering performance as well as a view-independent workpiece modeling. Hence, it is perfectly suited for of both simulation and verification in computeraided manufacturing (CAM) applications.