An improved rendering technique for ray tracing Bezier and B-spline surfaces

Abstract

Both numerical and subdivision methods are widely used approaches for ray tracing parametric surfaces. However, the expense of finding the ray-surface intersection points is a major drawback. Thus, simpler and less memory-intensive strategies are needed to improve these methods without further complicating them. This work presents an efficient algorithm for enhancing the performance of both numerical and subdivision methods. The proposed technique can be extended to most applications based on these two methods. The computational time of both approaches is improved by 16-40%. Copyright (C) 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.