Towards a heuristic based real time hybrid rendering a strategy to improve real time rendering quality using heuristics and ray tracing

Hybrid rendering combines the speed of raster-based rendering with the photorealism of ray trace rendering in order to achieve both speed and visual quality for interactive applications. Since ray tracing images is a demanding task, a hybrid renderer must use ray tracing carefully in order to maintain an acceptable frame rate. Fixed solutions, where only shadows or reflexive objects are ray traced not only cannot guarantee real time, but can represent a waste of processing, if the final result minimally differs from a raster only result. In our work, we present a method to improve hybrid rendering by analysing the scene in real time and decide what should be ray traced, in order to provide the best visual experience within acceptable frame rates.