Efficient Raytracing of Deforming Point‐Sampled Surfaces

We present efficient data structures and caching schemes to accelerate ray-surface intersections for deforming point-sampled surfaces.By exploiting spatial and temporal coherence of the deformation during the animation, we are able to improve rendering performance by a factor of two to three compared to existing techniques.Starting from a tight bounding sphere hierarchy for the undeformed object, we use a lazy updating scheme to adapt the hierarchy to the deformed surface in each animation step.In addition, we achieve a significant speedup for ray-surface intersections by caching per-ray intersection points.We also present a technique for rendering sharp edges and corners in point-sampled models by introducing a novel surface clipping algorithm.