Computing and Ray Tracing Point-Based Geometry

In this paper a new technique for computing and ray tracing point based geometry is presented. It uses a novel point primitive that is called "Spherical Patch Point" (SPP) to approximate the vicinity of a surface point. Due to property of curvature, SPP can achieve similar visual quality compared with previous methods with much fewer primitives for the cost of a few additional bytes per point and thus makes a significant reduction in rendering time. During pre-process, important attributes are added to each SPP for the purpose of ray tracing. During rendering, an intersection algorithm different from previous ones has been demonstrated to get satisfied results. The proposed technique makes it possible to render high quality ray traced images with global illumination using SPPs. It offers a higher ray tracing speed in comparison with previous methods