Ray Tracing from the Ground Up

Chapter 22

Regular Grids

Objectives

By the end of this chapter, you should:

• understand how regular-grid acceleration schemes work;
• appreciate the speed-up factors they can achieve;
• know how to place transformed objects in grids;
• have implemented a regular grid.

In previous chapters, I emphasized the importance of writing simple, efficient code, particularly in the hit functions. In Chapter 19, I discussed bounding boxes as a technique for accelerating the intersection of objects with complex hit functions. Despite this, the current ray tracer is still hopelessly inefficient for ray tracing large numbers of objects, the reason being that each ...