Ray tracing complex scenes

Abstract

A new algorithm for speeding up ray-object intersection calculations is presented. Objects are bounded by a new type of extent, which can be made to fit convex hulls arbitrarily tightly. The objects are placed into a hierarchy. A new hierarchy traversal algorithm is presented which is efficient in the sense that objects along the ray are queried in an efficient order.Results are presented which demonstrate that our technique is several times faster than other published algorithms. Furthermore, we demonstrate that it is currently possible to ray trace scenes containing hundreds of thousands of objects.