An Experimental Comparison of Acceleration Schemes for Densely Occluded Environments

This paper presents a comparative study of acceleration schemes for global illumination and ray tracing in large buildings. The system implemented relies on a memory-coherent ray shooting architecture. The scene is subdivided into cells, corresponding either to rooms when the information is available, or to voxels obtained with a uniform grid subdivision. Inside each cell an additional acceleration data structure is placed. Regular grids, multi-grids or kd-trees have been used with various parameters. We discuss the criteria for constructing different acceleration data structures as well as their advantages and drawbacks.