Efficient Ray Tracing of Dynamic Scenes on the GPU
Asger Dam Hoedt · 2012
The topic of this thesis is ray tracing dynamic scenes and doing that efficiently while harnessing the massive computational power of today’s graphics cards. It is motivated by the ever increasing interest in ray tracing and global illumination for creating effects in movies, but also the increased usage of 2D and 3D ray tracing in modern computer games. The thesis explores different techniques for creating hierarchical acceler-ation structures for ray tracing, specifically binary kd-trees, and how to create these efficiently on graphics processing units. The quality of a kd-tree is defined as the speed with which it can be used to ray trace a scene and a lot of previous research has been focused on creating kd-trees of high quality, which usually results in an increased construction time. The goal of this thesis is to explore the relationship between construction speed and tree quality for kd-trees. I will focus on dynamic scenes, where the kd-tree must be rebuild before an image