RAY TRACING IMPLICIT SURFACES

Abstract

We present an algorithm for ray tracing implicit surfaces. The algorithm first divides space uniformly and areas of interest are adaptively subdivided using an octree method. We review earlier work on reducing intersection calculations in ray tracing and introduce a new data structure, a variation on the octree, that is more efficient in both time and memory requirements. Our results indicate that using this hybrid algorithm retains the benefits of both uniform and octree subdivision while providing better average performance than using either one of these approaches alone.