Accelerating Shadow Rays Using Volumetric Occluders and Modified kd-Tree Traversal
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Date
2009
Authors
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Journal ISSN
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Publisher
The Eurographics Association
Abstract
Monte Carlo ray tracing remains a simple and elegant method for generating robust shadows. This approach, however, is often hampered by the time needed to evaluate the numerous shadow ray queries required to generate a high-quality image. We propose the use of volumetric occluders stored within a kd-tree in order to accelerate shadow rays cast on a closed, watertight mesh. Intersection with a volumetric occluder is much cheaper than intersection with mesh geometry, although performing these intersections requires modification to the traversal order through the kd-tree. We propose two such modifications, both of which enable the use of volumetric occluders for cheap shadow ray termination. We also propose using a software-managed cache to store and reuse volumetric occluders for even earlier termination. Our approach provides a performance improvement of up to 2.0x for our test scenes while producing images identical to those produced by the unaccelerated baseline.
Description
@inproceedings{:10.1145/1572769.1572781,
booktitle = {High-Performance Graphics},
editor = {David Luebke and Philipp Slusallek},
title = {{Accelerating Shadow Rays Using Volumetric Occluders and Modified kd-Tree Traversal}},
author = {Djeu, Peter and Keely, Sean and Hunt, Warren},
year = {2009},
publisher = {The Eurographics Association},
ISSN = {2079-8687},
ISBN = {978-1-60558-603-8},
DOI = {/10.1145/1572769.1572781}
}