Abstract
Ray tracing has been shown to be an excellent technique for rendering realistic images. However, it is important to reduce the lengthy computation time resulting from the brute-force nature of the original ray-tracing algorithms. In this paper, two ideas are proposed to speep up the well-known hierarchical subdivision method. First, a new hierarchy traversal scheme is described to reduce the number of raybounding volume intersection tests for secondary rays. Then, a plane-sweep method is proposed to make fewer intersection checks for eye rays. Experiments and discussions are presented to prove the feasibility of our methods.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Appel A (1968) Some techniques for shading machine renderings of solids. Proc AFIPS Spring Joint Comput Conf 32:37–45
Arvo J, Kirk D (1988) A survey of ray tracing acceleration techniques. SIGGRAPH Tutorial on Introduction to Ray Tracing. pp 1–46
Fujimoto A, Tanaka T, Iwata K (1986) ARTS: accelerated raytracing system. IEEE Comput Graph Appl 6(4):16–26
Glassner AS (1988) Space subdivision for fast ray tracing. IEEE Comput Graph Appl 4(10):15–22
Glassner AS (1988) Spacetime ray tracing for animation. IEEE Comput Graph Appl 8(2):60–70
Haines EA (1987) A proposal for standard graphics environments (displays on displays). IEEE Comput Graph Appl 7(11):3–5
Kay TL, Kajiya JT (1986) Ray tracing complex scenes. Comput Graph 20(4):269–278
Rubin SM, Whitted T (1980) A three-dimensional representation for fast rendering of complex scenes. Comput Graph 14(3):110–116
Scherson ID, Caspary E (1987) Data structure and the time complexity of ray tracing. The Visual Computer 3:201–213
Weghorst H, Hooper G, Greenberg DP (1984) Improved computational methods for ray tracing. ACM Trans Graph 3(1):52–69
Whitted T (1980) An improved illumination model for shaded display. Commun ACM 23(6):343–349
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Ke, HR., Chang, RC. An efficient hierarchicaltraversal algorithm for ray tracing. The Visual Computer 10, 79–87 (1993). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01901944
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01901944