Faster Ray-Traced Shadows for Hybrid Rendering of Fully Dynamic Scenes by Pre-BVH Culling

Abstract

With ever increasing ray traversal and hierarchy construction performance the application of ray tracing to problems often tackled by rasterization-based algorithms is becoming a viable alternative. This is especially desirable as the ground truth for these algorithms is often determined by using ray tracing and thus directly applying it is the simplest way to generate images satisfying the reference. In this paper we propose a very efficient pre-process to speed up the construction and traversal of sub-optimal, but fast-to-build hierarchies used for interactive ray tracing and show how it can be applied to shadow rays in a hybrid environment, where ray tracing is used to sample area lights for scene positions found and shaded via rasterization.