Lightweight Bounding Volumes for Ray Tracing

David Cline, Kevin Steele, and Parris Egbert
Brigham Young University

This paper appears in issue Volume 11, Number 4.
An electronic version of this article is available.

Abstract

This paper presents a memory-efficient auxiliary data structure for ray tracing called a lightweight bounding volume hierarchy, or LBVH. The new data structure reduces memory requirements in three ways: using implicit indexing, limited precision numbers, and a high branching factor. We show that LBVHs can be nearly as effective as standard bounding volumes in terms of speed while using significantly less memory. C++ source code for a ray tracer that implements LBVHs is provided online.

Author Information

David Cline, Brigham Young University, 1387 South 1470 East, Provo, UT 84606 clinedav@gmail.com

Kevin Steele, Brigham Young University, 3361 TMCB, Provo, UT 84602 steele@cs.byu.edu

Parris Egbert, Brigham Young University, 3361 TMCB, Provo, UT 84602 egbert@cs.byu.edu

Source Code

C++ source code for a ray tracer that implements lightweight bounding volumes.

lbvh.zip

BibTeX Entry

@article{ClineEtAl06,
  author = "David Cline and Kevin Steele and Parris Egbert",
  title = "Lightweight Bounding Volumes for Ray Tracing",
  journal = "journal of graphics, gpu, and game tools",
  volume = "11",
  number = "4",
  pages = "61-71",
  year = "2006",
}