Parallel Transformation of Bounding Volume Hierarchies into Oriented Bounding Box Trees

Abstract

Oriented bounding box (OBB) hierarchies can be used instead of hierarchies based on axis-aligned bounding boxes (AABB), providing tighter fitting to the underlying geometric structures and resulting in improved interference tests, such as ray-geometry intersections. In this paper, we present a method for the fast, parallel transformation of an existing bounding volume hierarchy (BVH), based on AABBs, into a hierarchy based on oriented bounding boxes. To this end, we parallelise a high-quality OBB extraction algorithm from the literature to operate as a standalone OBB estimator and further extend it to efficiently build an OBB hierarchy in a bottom up manner. This agglomerative approach allows for fast parallel execution and the formation of arbitrary, high-quality OBBs in bounding volume hierarchies. The method is fully implemented on the GPU and extensively evaluated with ray intersections.