42-Issue 4

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Ray-aligned Occupancy Map Array for Fast Approximate Ray Tracing
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2023) Zeng, Zheng; Xu, Zilin; Wang, Lu; Wu, Lifan; Yan, Ling-Qi; Ritschel, Tobias; Weidlich, Andrea
We present a new software ray tracing solution that efficiently computes visibilities in dynamic scenes. We first introduce a novel scene representation: ray-aligned occupancy map array (ROMA) that is generated by rasterizing the dynamic scene once per frame. Our key contribution is a fast and low-divergence tracing method computing visibilities in constant time, without constructing and traversing the traditional intersection acceleration data structures such as BVH. To further improve accuracy and alleviate aliasing, we use a spatiotemporal scheme to stochastically distribute the candidate ray samples. We demonstrate the practicality of our method by integrating it into a modern real-time renderer and showing better performance compared to existing techniques based on distance fields (DFs). Our method is free of the typical artifacts caused by incomplete scene information, and is about 2.5×-10× faster than generating and tracing DFs at the same resolution and equal storage.