STREAMING HIERARCHY TRAVERSAL RENDERER

摘要

A method is provided for a streaming hierarchy traversal renderer with particular application for feature films and other demanding content creation using scenes of high complexity that cannot fit in memory. The renderer organizes scene geometry into a spatial hierarchy, generates directional queries to be traced in the spatial hierarchy, performs a streaming hierarchy traversal over the directional queries, and uses the results of the directional queries to shade or render the scene. The traversal performs a single pass over the directional queries for splitting into one child stream of directional queries for each child node at each scene node in the hierarchy. A prioritized traversal of the hierarchy may also be carried out using various cost-metrics for optimized parallelism. The rendering may also bounce the directional queries to provide multi-pass global illumination.