Using Spatial Subdivision in Implementing the Interaction of Particle Systems with Virtual Environment on GPU

Abstract

Collisions are one of the most common types of object interaction with each other. This paper proposes distributed methods and algorithms for collision point calculation under simulation of particle system interaction with objects of virtual environment. Considered solutions are based on spatial subdivision of three-dimensional scene by means of regular grid, which is built in real time on a modern multicore graphics processor supporting the parallel computing architecture CUDA. Collision point search for each particle is performed on GPU as well. In this regard, possible intersections of particle's movement trajectory with polygons in grid cells are analyzed. Moreover this particle passed the grid at the time interval between rendering of the last and current frames of a virtual scene image. Based on proposed methods and algorithms, software modules for visualization systems of three-dimensional virtual scenes are created. They provide distributed simulation and visualization of particle system collisions with virtual environment objects on the CUDA-supported graphics processor in real time. The modules have been successfully tested and demonstrated their applicability in simulation-training complexes and virtual environment systems.