Ray Tracing Dynamic Scenes using Selective Restructuring

Abstract

We present a novel algorithm to selectively restructure bounding volume hierarchies (BVHs) for ray tracing dynamic scenes. We derive two new metrics to evaluate the culling efficiency and restructuring benefit of any BVH. Based on these metrics, we perform selective restructuring operations that efficiently reconstruct small portions of a BVH instead of the entire BVH. Our approach is general and applicable to complex and dynamic scenes, including topological changes. We use the selective restructuring algorithm to improve the performance of ray tracing dynamic scenes that consist of hundreds of thousands of triangles. In our benchmarks, we observe up to an order of magnitude improvement over prior BVH-based ray tracing algorithms.