Implementations of the claimed invention generally may relate to geometry compression and, more particularly, to accelerating polygon intersection tests required to test effectively a ray against a set of polygons.
Ray tracing is a well known method used in modeling of a variety of physical phenomena related to wave propagation in various media. For example it is used for computing illumination solution in photorealistic computer graphics, for complex environment channel modeling in wireless communication, aureal rendering in advanced audio applications, etc.
A ray is a half line of infinite length originating at a point in space described by a position vector which travels from said point along a direction vector. Ray tracing is used in computer graphics to determine visibility by directing one or more rays from a vantage point described by the ray's position vector along a line of sight described by the ray's direction vector. In most ray-tracing applications, it is necessary to determine the nearest visible surface along that line of sight and coordinates of the ray/surface intersection point. This requires that the ray be effectively tested for intersection against all the geometry within the virtual scene and retain the nearest intersection.