Geometry Caching for Ray-Tracing Displacement Maps

Abstract

We present a technique for rendering displacement mapped geometry in a raytracing Tenderer. Displacement mapping is an important technique for adding detail to surface geometry in rendering systems. It allows complex geometric variation to be added to simpler geometry, without the cost in geometric complexity of completely describing the nuances of the geometry at modeling time and with the advantage that the detail can be added adaptively at rendering time.

The cost of displacement mapping is geometric complexity. Renderers that provide it must be able to efficiently render scenes that have effectively millions of geometric primitives. Scan-line renderers process primitives one at a time, so this complexity doesn’t tax them, but traditional ray-tracing algorithms require random access to the entire scene database, so any part of the scene geometry may need to be available at any point during rendering. If the displaced geometry is fully instantiated in memory, it is straightforward to intersect rays with it, but displacement mapping has not yet been practical in ray-tracers due to the memory cost of holding this much geometry.

We introduce the use of a geometry cache in order to handle the large amounts of geometry created by displacement mapping. By caching a subset of the geometry created and rendering the image in a coherent manner, we are able to take advantage of the fact that the rays spawned by traditional ray-tracing algorithms are spatially coherent. Using our algorithm, we have efficiently rendered highly complex scenes while using a limited amount of memory.