The Slicing Extent Technique For Ray-Tracing - Isolating Sparse And Dense Areas

Since the last few years, we have been developing the Slicing Extent Technique (SET) for ray tracing. The main difference, between SET and other existing space subdivision techniques, is that 3D-voxels are not used for space partitioning. Instead SET considers the two dimensional projections of the extent surrounding the objects. In this paper, we focus on describing the improvements in the performance, as a result of identifying the dense and sparse areas of the scene. During ray tracing the sparse areas are quickly bypassed. To further reduce the image generation time, SET is applied one more time inside the dense area of the scene. We first describe the Slicing Extent Technique, A uniform partitioning to SET data structure is added to obtain the Modified Slicing Extent Technique (MSET). Next an oct tree is used, during preprocessing, to isolate the blank and dense areas in the scene. However, this oct tree is never used during ray tracing. An analytic comparison of SET and other existing techniques is provided. We also identify future research directions