Rayskip: faster ray tracing of implicit surface animations

Abstract

Implicit surfaces offer several advantages over other volume representations, but despite the ease with which CSG and smooth blending can be used to construct complex models they are not commonly used. The main reason for this is the long visualization time, especially when the surface is being rendered using ray tracing.In this paper an algorithm called RaySkip is described. Rayskip improves rendering times of ray tracing animations of implicit surfaces (19% to 55% per frame). This is accomplished by exploiting object space coherence and temporal coherence, reducing the number of evaluations of the surface needed to trace a ray.