Using projection to accelerate Ray Tracing

USING PROJECTION TO ACCELERATE RAY TRACING An ast asia Bezerianos M.Sc. Graduate Department of Cornputer Science University of Toronto 2001 The high cost of Ray Tracing image rendering has driven many researchers to devise acceleration techniques like bounding volume hierarchies. This thesis introduces new ways of building bounding volume hierarchies. We modify existing algorithms to use bounding volumes projected ont0 the viewing and light planes. This allows faster traversal of less tight hierarchies. First, hierarchical structures are constnicted using only the information derived fiom the projection of the bounding volumes. Second, a view independent hierarchical structure is projected ont0 the viewing and light planes. Finally, we augment each of the previous hierarchies with testing rayç against both the projected and the view independent volume. Thus fast traversal of the hierarchy and tight modeling are combined. Testing demonstrates that projection hierarchies accelerate Ray Tracing when the number of objects in a scene is large and the number of possible hierarchies to choose hom is limited.