Exploring a Boeing 777: Ray Tracing Large-Scale CAD Data

This article describes the application of ray tracing to several aircraft manufacturing scenarios. Today's computer-aided design frameworks and techniques are extensively applied in virtually all industrial engineering design projects. The emergence of modeling systems powerful enough to manage an entire geometric project database has made it possible to design complete airplanes, ships, cars, and so on, digitally. Such large-scale projects over their duration generate vast amounts of data. While CAD systems allow modeling of individual components, the complexity of geometric design data is increasing faster than the capabilities of full model visualization tools.