A New Point-Based Rendering Method for Ray Tracing

In this paper a new point-based rendering method for ray tracing is presented. An oriented spherical patch that passes a surface point is used to approximate the vicinity of that point. In this paper the spherical patch together with the surface point is called "spherical patch point" (SPP). Due to property of curvature, SPP can achieve similar visual quality compared with previous methods with much fewer points. This paper defines new point attributes for the purpose of efficiently locating the intersection between incoming ray and SPPs. Accordingly, an algorithm of intersecting a ray with point geometry is proposed. The algorithm can achieve a higher rendering speed in comparison with previous methods. The presented technique deals well with shadow, reflection and refraction