Abstract
A major fraction of ray-tracing computation time is spent on ray-object intersection calculation. To reduce this calculation cost, one method, ARTS, subdivides the 3-D object space into voxels and uses a 3-D line-drawing routine to simulate ray propagation in the subdivided space to select objects for intersection testing. Finer space subdivision gives better object selection resolution and fewer ray-object tests. However, as the subdivision increases, the improvement is offset by a linear degradation of the line-drawing-routine efficiency and a cubic growth of the memory requirement. We solve these time and memory scalability problems in ARTS using an adaptive 3-D line-drawing algorithm, which traverses space with multiple stepsizes, and a hybrid database that employs both the octree and the 3-D array data structures. The space traversal cost in our solution grows logarithmically with the subdivision increase, and the memory requirement grows only linearly.
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Hsiung, PK., Thibadeau, R. Accelerating ARTS. The Visual Computer 8, 181–190 (1992). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01902138
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01902138