Hardware-assisted Rendering of CSG Models

Abstract

Current methods that interactively render reasonably complex CSG objects are image based and are severely bandwidth limited. This paper presents a new approach to ray-tracing CSG objects composed of convex primitives that combines spatial subdivision and ray-tracing methods. By performing spatial subdivision on the CSG object until locally it is simple enough to be rendered effectively and efficiently on a GPU, we are able to share the load more evenly between the CPU and the GPU and depend less on bandwidth and more on GPU instruction throughput than current methods, hence obtaining better scalability with newer hardware