Parameter‐Preserving Real‐time BIM Rendering via Direct GPU Ray Tracing

ABSTRACT

Current BIM visualization systems tessellate parametric geometry into triangle meshes before rendering, which increases memory usage, introduces faceting on curved surfaces, and adds significant export‐time overhead. We present an end‐to‐end system that preserves parametric shape definitions from BIM models through to GPU ray tracing, bypassing mesh conversion for supported parametric shapes. Our exporter extracts parametric shapes from a BIM authoring tool and encodes them into a compact binary format with two‐tier caching to avoid redundant extraction. Our renderer maps preserved BIM primitives to an instanced GPU scene layout and performs direct ray‐primitive intersections, with mixed‐precision parameter encoding and ray advancement improving memory efficiency and numerical robustness. Evaluation on architectural projects shows that our system achieves a lower GPU memory footprint, produces mathematically exact curved surfaces free of tessellation artifacts, and exports models faster than standard workflows.