Rendering Polygon Scenes With Ray Tracing

[JDB]

There's one other important optimization method I forgot to mention in my last post but I did briefly mention it in the paper. A traditional 3D acceleration structure can be precomputed for each object and used to sort the triangles in the mesh so that when it comes time to test a ray against that object the acceleration structure can be used to skip many of the triangles not in the path of the ray. However that would only really be useful if using the bounding box to fill the pixel blocks. I think there's a good chance that approach would be faster than looping through all the triangles and calculating which pixel blocks they cover. But it would only work for objects with static meshes, which is ok since most meshes are static. It may be possible to recompute the acceleration structure for objects with non-static meshes when they change, but I don't think that would be very fast. But I think using the bounding boxes with a 2D acceleration structure in conjunction with a precomputed 3D acceleration structure for each object mesh, could be very fast and scale well.