Direct Ray Tracing of Phong Tessellation

Abstract

There are two major ways of calculating ray and parametric surface intersections in rendering. The first is through the use of tessellated triangles, and the second is to use parametric surfaces together with numerical methods such as Newton's method. Both methods are computationally expensive and complicated to implement. In this paper, we focus on Phong Tessellation and introduce a simple direct ray tracing method for Phong Tessellation. Our method enables rendering smooth surfaces in a computationally inexpensive yet robust way.