NVIDIA Micro-Mesh

Displaced Micro-Mesh SDK

With Displaced Micro-Mesh, you can build highly detailed and complex geometries that are very compact and efficient to render. Built on a structured graphics primitive using micro-triangles, assets can be used in their full fidelity, designed to be directly rasterized or ray traced in real time without conversion or expansion. Currently, standard graphics primitives are not designed for highly detailed organic surfaces, characters, or objects. This is the only technology built from the ground up for real-time ray tracing with up to a 50X increase in geometry.

Sample micro-mesh composed of (first image) 175K individual micro-meshes, expanding to (second image) 57 million micro-triangles, consuming ~4 bits per micro-triangle; from Smithsonian 3D

Ada uses Opacity Micro-Maps to increase performance by avoiding any hit shader invocation (running them only in yellow areas)

Opacity Micro-Map SDK

With Opacity Micro-Map, you can more efficiently map intricate geometries onto triangles and micro-meshes. This technology encodes the opacity of micro-triangles and makes it possible to ray trace, at high performance, extremely detailed scene elements such as vegetation and foliage. A traditional alpha texture requires a more costly any-hit shader to produce the same result. Opacity Micro-Map was designed to support real-time ray tracing of extremely detailed elements, like ferns or door screens, with little cost, creating headroom for dramatically increased richness and realism.