A new space subdivision for ray tracing CSG solids

Ray tracing successfully creates realistic images of constructive solid geometry (CSG) solids. We describe a nonuniform space subdivision scheme that reduces both the number of ray-object intersection computations and point classifications. Our method uses the face planes of the primitives' S-bounds in a bottom-up fashion and produces a subdivision wherein the localized CSG tree in each leaf voxel is greatly minimized. The use of S-bounds in the space subdivision effectively reduces the number of intersection computations as well. The reduction of the localized CSG tree in turn further reduces the number of intersection computations and point classifications. We briefly review existing methods for ray tracing CSG solids, describe our proposed space subdivision method, discuss our implementation and compare it to Bouatouch's (1987) method, and summarize our test results.<
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