Ray tracing animated scenes using coherent grid traversal
Ingo Wald, Thiago Ize, Andrew Kensler, Aaron Knoll, Steven G. Parker · ACM Transactions on Graphics · 2006
We present a new approach to interactive ray tracing of moderate-sized animated scenes based on traversing frustum-bounded packets of coherent rays through uniform grids. By incrementally computing the overlap of the frustum with a slice of grid cells, we accelerate grid traversal by more than a factor of 10, and achieve ray tracing performance competitive with the fastest known packet-based kd-tree ray tracers. The ability to efficiently rebuild the grid on every frame enables this performance even for fully dynamic scenes that typically challenge interactive ray tracing systems.