Lecture #09. Acceleration structures

Computer graphics in Game development

Ivan Belyavtsev

01.10.2022

Raytracing complexity

In the case of 1 ray per pixel without additional ray casting the complexity of ray tracing is rays number * (triangles number * MT algorithm cost + Closest Hit cost)

From: [1][2]

Complexity reduction strategies

  • Traversing bigger chunks of geometry at the same time
  • Reducing the cost of the MT algorithm
  • Using non-linear data structures

Model grouping

Obj file was parsed to a vector of shapes. Each shape has its own vertex and index buffers. Let’s use the each shape as a single chunk for traversing. How we can find the shape-ray intersection?

Bounding volume

From: https://flylib.com/books/en/2.124.1.130/1/

Axis-aligned bounding boxes (AABB)

From: https://3dengine.org/Bounding_volume/

AABB intersection algorithm

float3 invRaydir = float3(1.0) / ray.direction;
float3 t0 = (aabb_max - ray.position) * invRaydir;
float3 t1 = (aabb_min - ray.position) * invRaydir;
float3 tmin = min(t0, t1);
float3 tmax = max(t0, t1);
return maxelem(tmin) <= minelem(tmax);

[3]

Bounding volume hierarchy

  • Top-level acceleration structures (TLAS)
  • Bottom-level acceleration structures (BLAS)
From: [1]

How to build trees of acceleration structures

Surface area heuristic (SAH):

\[C(A, B) = t_{trav}+p_{A}\sum_{i=1}^{N_A}t_{int}(a_i) + p_{B}\sum_{i=1}^{N_B}t_{int}(b_i)\]

where \(C\) - cost of traversing the node, \(p_{A}\) and \(p_{B}\) are the probabilities that the ray passes through the subvolumes \(A\) and \(B\) [4]

Question: why TLAS won’t speed up the Cornell box scene?

Original

Lab: 2.05 Axis-aligned bounding boxes

  1. Implement aabb class
  2. Implement build_acceleration_structure method of raytracer class
  3. Adjust trace_ray method of raytracer class to traverse the acceleration structure
  4. Adjust ray_tracing_renderer class to build the acceleration structure

References

1.
Lefrançois M.-K., Gautron P. DX12 raytracing tutorial - part 2 [Electronic resource]. URL: https://developer.nvidia.com/rtx/raytracing/dxr/DX12-Raytracing-tutorial-Part-2.
2.
Parker S.G. et al. OptiX: A general purpose ray tracing engine // ACM SIGGRAPH 2010 papers. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 2010.
3.
McGuire M. The graphics codex. 2.14 ed. Casual Effects, 2018.
4.
Pharr M., Jakob W., Humphreys G. Physically based rendering: From theory to implementation [Electronic resource]. 2021. URL: https://pbr-book.org/.