Ray Tracing Lossy Compressed Grid Primitives

Abstract

We propose a new watertight representation of geometry for ray tracing highly complex scenes in a memory efficient manner. Polygon meshes in the scene are first converted into compressed grid primitives, which are represented by a base bilinear patch with quantized displacement vectors. Ray-scene intersections are then computed by efficiently decompressing these grids onthe- fly and intersecting the implicit triangles. Our representation requires just 5:4??6:6 bytes per triangle for the combined geometry and acceleration structure, resulting in a 5-7x reduction in memory footprint compared to indexed triangle meshes. This is achieved with less than 15% increase in rendering time.