Systems and techniques are described for ray tracing and for the efficient construction of acceleration data structures required for fast ray tracing. A computer graphics system generates, for each pixel in an image, a pixel value that is representative of a point in a scene as recorded on an image plane of a simulated camera. The computer graphics system is configured to generate the pixel value for an image using a selected ray-tracing methodology. The selected ray-tracing methodology includes the use of a ray tree that includes at least one ray shot from the pixel into a scene along a selected direction. The ray-tracing methodology further includes calculating the intersections of rays and surfaces in the scene. An axis-aligned bounding box is defined that contains, for a given ray, the point of intersection of the ray and surface nearest the origin of the ray. The bounding box is iteratively refined until a predetermined termination criterion has been met.
CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS
The present application is a Continuation-In-Part of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/299,574 filed Nov. 19, 2002 (issued as U.S. Pat No. 7,184,042), which is a Continuation-In-Part of U.S. Ser. No. 09/884,861 filed Jun. 19, 2001 (issued as U.S. Pat. No. 7,227,547), which claims priority benefit from provisional applications No. 60/265,934 filed Feb. 1, 2001 (expired) and 60/212,286 filed Jun. 19, 2000 (expired) each of which is incorporated by reference.
The present application claims the benefit of United States Provisional Patent Application Ser. No. 60/693,231, filed on Jun. 23, 2005 (expired), which is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety.
