ABSTRACT

This chapter describes an improvement to the stackless linear bounding volume hierarchy (SLBVH) presented in, which is a new way for traversing and constructing a linear bounding volume hierarchy. The SLBVH enables dynamic scenes relying on a fast construction algorithm while maintaining traversal performance for real-time ray tracing. Rendering dynamic scenes with ray tracing is a major challenge on hardware and software implementations. The main difference from conventional ray tracing is that each time a ray hits a primitive, the reflected direction is generated from a random distribution based on the properties of the material. The SLBVH is a stackless and pointerless binary heap that uses a middle split approach based on the Morton code of primitives. The SLBVH suffers with heterogeneous models such as the Conference Room and Crytek Sponza. Hundreds of small triangles are stored in leaf nodes, which impacts enormously on traversal times.