Ray tracing animated scenes using coherent grid traversal

Abstract

We present a new approach to interactive ray tracing of moderate-sized animated scenes based on traversing frustum-bounded packets of coherent rays through uniform grids. By incrementally computing the overlap of the frustum with a slice of grid cells, we accelerate grid traversal by more than a factor of 10, and achieve ray tracing performance competitive with the fastest known packet-based kd-tree ray tracers. The ability to efficiently rebuild the grid on every frame enables this performance even for fully dynamic scenes that typically challenge interactive ray tracing systems.

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Index Terms

• Computing methodologies

  • Artificial intelligence

    • Computer vision

      • Computer vision tasks

  • Computer graphics

    • Animation

    • Shape modeling

  • Modeling and simulation

    • Simulation types and techniques

      • Simulation by animation

• Theory of computation

  • Randomness, geometry and discrete structures