Direct ray tracing of 3d scenes

Abstract

Determining intersections between rays and triangles is at the heart of most Computer Generated 3D images. The present disclosure describes a new method for determining the intersections between a set of rays and a set of triangles. The method is unique as it processes arbitrary rays and arbitrary primitives, and provides the lower complexity typical to ray-tracing algorithms without making use of a spatial subdivision data structure which would require additional memory storage. Such low memory usage is particularly beneficial to all computer systems creating 3D images where the available on-board memory is limited and critical, and must be minimized. Also, a pivot-based streaming novelty allows minimizing conditional branching inherent to normal ray-tracing techniques by handling large streams of rays. In most cases, our method displays much faster times for solving similar intersection problems than preceding state of the art methods on similar systems.