Ray Tracing Deformable Scenes Using Dynamic Bounding Volume Hierarchies INGO WALD, SOLOMON BOULOS, and PETER SHIRLEY University of Utah The most significant deficiency of most of today’s interactive ray tracers is that they are restricted to static walkthroughs. This restriction is due to the static nature of the acceleration structures used. While the best reported frame rates for static geometric models have been achieved using carefully constructed kd-trees, this article shows that bounding volume hierarchies (BVHs) can be used to efficiently ray trace large static models. More importantly, the BVH can be used to ray trace deformable models (sets of triangles whose positions change over time) with little loss of performance. A variety of efficiency techniques are used to achieve this performance, but three algorithmic changes to the typical BVH algorithm are mainly responsible. First, the BVH is built using a variant of the surface area heuristic conventionally used to build kd-trees. Second, the topology of the BVH is not changed over time so that only the bounding volumes need to be refit from frame-to-frame. Third, and most importantly, packets of rays are traced together through the BVH using a novel integrated packet-frustum traversal scheme. This traversal scheme elegantly combines the advantages of both packet traversal and frustum traversal and allows for rapid hierarchy descent for packets that hit bounding volumes as well as rapid exits for packets that miss. A BVH-based ray tracing system using these techniques is shown to achieve performance for deformable models comparable to that previously available only for static models. Categories and Subject Descriptors: I.3.7 [Computer Graphics]: Three-Dimensional Graphics and Realism—Raytracing; I.3.3 [Computer Graphics]: Picture/Image Generation—Display algorithms General Terms: Algorithms, Performance Additional Key Words and Phrases: ACM Reference Format: Wald, I., Boulos, S., and Shirley, P. 2007. Ray tracing deformable scenes using dynamic bounding volume hierarchies. ACM Trans. Graph. 26, 1, Article 6 (January 2007), 18 pages. DOI = 10.1145/1186644.1186650 http://doi.acm.org/ 10.1145/1186644.1186650 1. INTRODUCTION sued, for example Wald et al. [2006], Lauterbach et al. [2006], Stoll et al. [2006], G¨unther et al. [2006], and Carr et al. [2006]. Recent trends in computer architecture and model complexity, along In this article, we use a bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) [Rubin with a desire for improved visual realism, have spurred researchers and Whitted 1980] to interactively ray trace a particular type of dy- to consider ray tracing as an alternative to Z-buffering, and ray trac- namic scene, deformable scenes. A deformable scene is one whose ing has since been demonstrated to be a viable method for a wide triangles move, but no triangles are split, created, or destroyed over class of interactive applications [Muuss 1995; Parker et al. 1999; time. An example of such a scene is shown in Figure 1, where two Wald 2004; Reshetov et al. 2005]. Until recently, these demon- meshes deform and change position within an animated polygo- strations have largely been restricted to static scenes; ray tracing nal environment. The entire scene is ray traced with a single BVH dynamic scenes has not been able to yield such high frame rates. whose topology is constant for the whole animation. This approach The reason ray tracing is problematic for dynamic scenes is that was motivated by the successful use of constant topology BVHs fast ray tracers use precomputed spatial search structures to achieve for collision detection between deformable objects [van den Bergen interactive frame rates. For most data structures, rebuilding these for 1997; Schmidl et al. 2004]. In contrast to spatial subdivision struc- each frame is too expensive except for relatively small models [Wald tures such as the kd-tree, the BVH subdivides the object hierarchy, et al. 2003]. Ray tracing’s historical failure to deal with dynamic and a given object hierarchy is more robust over time than a given scenes is a major limitation because these scenes are important for subdivision of space. As a result, a BVH can be quickly updated a large class of applications such as games and simulation [Mark between frames, thus avoiding a complete per-frame rebuilding and Fussell 2005]. Because of their importance, several concurrent phase [Larsson and Akenine-M¨oller 2003]. However, a barrier to approaches for ray tracing dynamic scenes are currently being pur- exploiting the BVH’s advantages for dynamic scenes is that their I. Wald was supported by the State of Utah Center of Excellence Program and the US Department of Energy through the Center for the Simulation of Accidental Fires and Explosions under Grant W-7405-ENG-48. P. Shirley was supported by the National Science Foundation Grant 03-06141 and the Utah Center of Excellence Program. S. Boulos was supported by the Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship. Authors’ addresses: University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT 84112; email: [email protected]; {boulos, shirley}@cs.utah.edu. 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Wald et al. Fig. 1. Screenshots from an animated 180,000 triangle scene with moving dragonfly, fairy, and plants. At 1024 × 1024 pixels the animated scene is ray traced at roughly 3.7 frames-per-second on a dual 2.6 GHz Opteron desktop PC including shadows and texturing. Box Box Box 2 tris 2 tris Fig. 2. Different BVHs for 4 triangles. The siblings are allowed to spatially overlap (unlike spatial subdivision). Other possibilities include splitting to size 1 and 3 triangle list and recursively splitting lists of 2 or 3 triangles. performance on static scenes has lagged far behind that achieved kd-trees [Bentley 1975] were probably the best, and BVHs were by using kd-trees [Wald 2004; Reshetov et al. 2005]. far the worst data structures for ray tracing. In this article, we demonstrate how BVHs can be used for fast Interactive ray tracing. In the last decade a number of interactive ray tracing of static models by using many of the same techniques ray tracing systems have been developed on a variety of architec- developed for kd-trees including careful tree construction, SIMD tures. Wald [2004] used kd-trees to achieve interactivity on both programming, and the use of ray packets. In addition, we propose single PCs and clusters of PCs. His implementation was released as a novel traversal algorithm that benefits from ray packets which are part of the OpenRT system which we use as a comparison baseline much larger than the 4-ray packets commonly used (e.g., Wald et al. in this article. Interactive ray tracing has also been demonstrated [2001] and Lauterbach et al. [2006]). The combination of these on a variety of platforms including supercomputers [Parker 2002], techniques allows a BVH to be competitive with a kd-tree even FPGAs [Schmittler et al. 2002; Woop et al. 2005], GPUs [Purcell where kd-trees perform at their best. By using a constant topology et al. 2002; Foley and Sugerman 2005; Carr et al. 2006], and the BVH that is only refit for each frame, we can naturally extend our Cell [Minor et al. 2005]. system to handle dynamic scenes. We empirically show—for at least a wide class of dynamic scenes—that the rendering performance of Bounding volume hierarchies. BVHs are trees that store a closed using a constant topology is close to the optimal case of a BVH built bounding volume at each node. In addition, each internal node has specifically for that frame. Our approach does not require knowledge references to child nodes, and each leaf node also stores a list of ge- of all frames of an animation so it should be applicable to models ometric primitives. The bounding volume is guaranteed to enclose driven by physics or user interaction. the bounding volumes of all its descendants. Each geometric prim- itive is in exactly one leaf, while each spatial location can be in 2. BACKGROUND an arbitrary number of leaves. A variety of shapes have been used Ray tracing was used for rendering at least as early as the classic for the bounding volumes [Weghorst et al. 1984], with axis-aligned work by Appel [1968], but was introduced in its modern form by boxes a common choice. An example of different BVHs for a small Whitted [1980]. To speed up intersection, hand-constructed bound- model are shown in Figure 2. ing volume hierarchies (BVHs) [Clark 1976] were the first spa- Building BVHs. Goldsmith and Salmon [1987] used a cost model tial efficiency structure used for ray tracing [Rubin and Whitted to optimize the bottom-up construction of BVHs. Top-down builds 1980; Whitted 1980].