I've had a lot of requests for the .NET 2.0 based raytracer that I used in my Master Thesis to generate true orthophotos based on complex 3D surface models (not necessarily 2½D). To save me from having to dig it up all the time, I've now posted it here on my blog so you can download it from here.

Basically it will read in a text file with triangles (each triangle defined per line as comma-separated double values X1,Y1,Z1,X2,Y2,Z2,X3,Y3,Z3), create a spatial index using axis-aligned boundingboxes, and perform ray/triangle intersections, returning any triangle intersecting the ray, including distance to triangle and angle of attack.

To save memory on larger DSM, all internal computation is done using floating-point insted of using double precision. This poses a problem for large values like UTM based coordinate systems, where rounding errors will occur when using floating point. The raytracer is internally applying an offset to the center of the data extents to accommodate for this, but it's worth remembering if your DSM covers a vast area. In most cases it's not a big issue though.

The raytracer scales very well (O(log n)), and can handle hundreds of thousands of faces and still raytrace in a few milliseconds (see chapter 7.3.3 of the thesis for details). Performing the required indexing first might be a little slow, so if you want to optimize this, be my guest ;-).

Some uses this engine has been involved in is generating rough worldfiles for aerial images based on absolute camera orientation and a surface model or Simulating Navstar and Galileo GPS availability in dense urban areas. The latter was actually some very cool stuff developed by some students at DTU. You could click anywhere on a map, and it would instantly simulate the visibility of Navstar and Galileo GPS satellites and give you the PDOP values throughout the day, based on a detailed 3D city model. This was used to determine where the zones of GPS based roadpricing should be (you didn't want the zone edges to be close to a place where you had poor accuracy causing people to be charged incorrectly). The raytracer was used for doing the line-of-sight analysis between a virtual car and all the satellites.

Download: Raytracer.zip (86.29 KB)