Multi-level tetrahedralization-based accelerator for ray-tracing animated scenes

We describe a hybrid acceleration structure for ray tracing. The hybrid structure is a Bounding Volume Hierarchy (BVH) where the leaf nodes are tetrahedralized for a decent ray-surface intersection performance. We use the hybrid acceleration structure (BTH) in a two-level acceleration structure for rendering animated scenes. There is a BVH at the top level in this two-level structure and the proposed hybrid structure (BTH) at the bottom level. We test the proposed two-level structure (BVH-BTH) for various animated scenes and obtained promising results against other acceleration structures in terms of rendering times. The two-level BVH-BTH structure outperforms the two-level BVH structure for the tested dynamic scenes.