An efficient technique for ray tracing of a D0L-system

Presents an algorithm which aims at reducing the execution time and memory requirements of the synthesis of plants which are generated by a D0L system (deterministic context-free Lindenmayer system) and rendered by ray tracing. We propose a new method that carries out an intersection test directly with the production obtained by a D0L system, and thus attain considerable size reduction in the database. To reduce the computation time, the method works with a bounding volume hierarchy and adapts to the available memory by storing the hierarchy as far as a certain depth. Both the graphical primitives and those bounding volumes that have not been stored in memory are calculated at tracing time when they are required. We have compared our intersection test with a classical intersection test and with the commercial ray tracer PovRay, obtaining important reductions in computation time and memory in both cases.