Compact tetrahedralization-based acceleration structures for ray tracing

Abstract

We propose compact and efficient tetrahedral mesh representations to improve the ray-tracing performance. We reorder tetrahedral mesh data using a space-filling curve to improve cache locality. Most importantly, we propose efficient ray-traversal algorithms. We provide details of the regular ray-tracing operations on tetrahedral meshes and the GPU implementation of our traversal method. We demonstrate our findings through a set of comprehensive experiments. Our method outperforms existing tetrahedral mesh-based traversal methods and yields comparable results to the traversal methods based on the state-of-the-art acceleration structures such as k-dimensional (k-d) tree and Bounding Volume Hierarchy (BVH) in terms of speed. Storage-wise, our method uses less memory than its tetrahedral mesh-based counterparts, thus allowing larger scenes to be rendered on the GPU. Graphic Abstract: [Figure not available: see fulltext.] © 2022, The Visualization Society of Japan.