Index to Ray Tracing News
The following is an index to some of the articles in Ray Tracing News, an electronic newsletter edited by Eric Haines. I created the index primarily to organize the articles from RTN devoted to the topic of spatial data structures for optimizing ray tracing, but I've also included some other articles that looked interesting to me. The index was created for a course I'm teaching.
Each article is listed just once, with title, author(s), and in some cases, my summary or comments on the article in italics. I can't vouch for the accuracy of the information in these articles. RTN articles generally have quality somewhere between that of a SIGGRAPH paper and a comp.graphics.algorithms posting. But that's a wide range!
Please let me know of errors or mis-categorizations you find here.
- Paul Heckbert (and updated by Eric Haines)
Categories:
-
The Ups and Downs of Multithreaded Ray Tracing and Optimization, by
John Stone, December 21, 1999
-
Realtime Techniques for Ray Tracing, by Ádám Nagy, Eric Haines,
Russel Simmons, Paul Kahler, Factory, and Bruno Schödlbauer, July 16, 2000
-
RealStorm: A Realtime Raytracing Engine, by Michael Piepgras, October 21, 2002
- Real-Time GPU Spheres, by John Stone, December 12, 2005
- Book Reviews on Hierarchical Data Structures of Hanan Samet, by A. T. Campbell, III, January 2, 1990
- Any Future for Efficiency Research? by Eric Haines, August 26, 1992
- 3D Point Hashing, by Steve Worley, January 18, 1996
- Grids (Uniform, Hierarchical, and Nonuniform)
- Ideal Grid/Object Densities, by Dan Gehlhaar, Marc Andreessen, July 10, 1992
- Uniform Grids
- 3DDDA Comments, by John Spackman, March 1, 1991
(uniform grid traversal)
- Comparison of Ray Traversal Methods, by Erik Jansen, February 2.01, 1994
(results on grid method)
- Fast Raytracing via SEADS, by John Chapman and Wilfrid Lefer, February 2.01, 1994
(grids and nested grids)
- Additional Notes on Nested Grids, by Kris Klimaszewski, Andrew Woo, Frederic Cazals, and Eric Haines, December 2, 1997
- Recursive Grids and Ray Bounding Box Comments and Timings, by Andrew Woo, December 2, 1997
- Comparison of Hierarchical Grids, by Vlastimil Havran and Filip Sixta, June 25, 1999
- Quicker Grid Generation via Memory Allocation, by Eric Haines, June 25, 1999
- Objects per Grid Cell, by Pete Shirley, October 21, 2002
- Non-Uniform Grids
- Adaptive Trees (Octrees, k-d, BSP)
- Octrees
- Response to the "teapot in a football stadium" Problem, by Andrew Glassner, March 1, 1988
(hybrid of octree & bounding volume)
- Linear-time Voxel Walking for Octrees, by Jim Arvo, March 26, 1988
(nice article; see also similar ideas by Erik Jansen)
- Octree, edited by Eric Haines, October 27, 1989
- Octrees and Whatnot, by Steve Worley and Eric Haines, May 16, 1995
(best way to build octree hierarchy, also about HBV)
- Octree Neighbor Finding, by Andrew Glassner, Francois Sillion, and Paul Heckbert
- Octree Traversal and the Best Efficiency Scheme, by Ben Hutchison, Eric Haines, Hanan Samet, and Erik Jansen
- A Summary of Octree Ray Traversal Algorithms, by Vlastimil Havran, December 21, 1999
- Additional Octree Traversal Notes, by John Spackman, Erik Jansen, and Joel Welling, December 21, 1999
- Octree Implementation and RTRT Speeds, by Paul Kahler,
Vlastimil Havran, Ingo Wald, John Stone, and Nick Chirkov, August 9, 2001
- Loose Octrees for Dynamic Raytracing, by Eric Haines, August 9, 2001
- Binary Space Partitioning (BSP) Trees
- Re: Linear-time Voxel Walking for BSP, by Erik Jansen, April 6, 1988
(good, see also Arvo's octree article above)
- Recursive Ray Traversal, by Erik Jansen and Wim de Leeuw, July 10, 1992
(concludes that recursive traversal of BSP data structure is faster than incremental)
- BSP Traversal Errata, by Kelvin Sung, August 26, 1992
- BSP Plane Cost Function Revisited, by Eric Haines, May 11, 2004
- K-d Tree Comments, by Ingo Wald, Gordon Stoll, Vlastimil Havran, and Eric Haines, December 12, 2005
Hierarchical Bounding Volumes (HBV's, aka BVH's) (also see Bounding Box Intersection)
- Bounding Volume Hierarchy, edited by Eric Haines, October 27, 1989
- Bounding Box Intersection, edited by Eric Haines, October 27, 1989
- BVH Traversal Results, by Nicholas Wilt, July 10, 1992
- Bounding Volumes (Sphere vs. Box), by Tom Wilson, January 27, 1993
- Bounding Box Intersection via Origin Location, by Eric Haines, August 9, 2001
- Ray-Box Sorting, by Solomon Boulos and Eric Haines, September 30, 2006
- BVHs and Memory Coherence, notes by Christer Ericson and Sung-Eui Yoon, September 30, 2006
- Tight Bounding Spheres
- Minimum Bounding Sphere, continued, by Jack Ritter, June 21, 1989
(fast algorithm to find a near-optimal sphere around n points)
- Minimum Bounding Sphere Program, by Marshall Levine, October 13, 1989
- Solution to Smallest Sphere Enclosing a Set of Points, by Tom Shermer, January 2, 1990
(references to computational geometry papers that find smallest sphere)
- Goldsmith/Salmon: Automatic Creation of Bounding Volume Hierarchies
- Goldsmith/Salmon Hierarchy Building, by Jeff Goldsmith, March 8, 1988
- Automatic Creation of Object Hierarchies for Ray Tracing, by Eric Haines, April 6, 1988
(lengthy)
- Re: Goldsmith and Eyes, by K.R.Subramanian, November 4, 1988
(optimization for eye rays)
- An Improvement to Goldsmith/Salmon, by Jeff Goldsmith, March 20, 1990
- Faster Bounding Volume Hierarchies, by Brian Smits and Eric Haines, September 28, 1993
(using randomization and multiple trials to find the best clustering, useful for both Goldsmith/Salmon and Kay/Kajiya)
- Kay/Kajiya: Intersection of Slabs Method
- Sorting Unnecessary on Shadow Rays for Kay/Kajiya? by Eric Haines and Mark VandeWettering, September 11, 1988
- More Comments on Kay/Kajiya, by Jeff Goldsmith, Eric Haines, October 3, 1988
- Question: Kay and Kajiya Slabs for Arbitrary Quadrics? by Thomas C. Palmer, January 2, 1990
- Convex Polyhedron Intersection via Kay & Kajiya, by Eric Haines, October 1, 1990
Other, Fancier Spatial Data Structures
Partial list:
- Mailboxes and Other Miscellaneous Speedups for Spatial Data Structures
- Public Ray Tracing Software
Partial list:
- Benchmarking Ray Tracers
- Comparison of Kolb, Haines, and MTV Ray Tracers, Part I, by Eric Haines, January 2, 1990
(using grids, HBV)
- Comments on Last Issue, by Mark VandeWettering, March 20, 1990
(MTV ray tracer switched to Goldsmith/Salmon)
- New Version of SPD Now Available, by Eric Haines, March 1, 1991
("Standard Procedural Databases" for benchmarking ray tracers)
- Ray Tracer Races, Round 2, by Eric Haines, July 1, 1993
- An Enhanced Standard Procedural Databases Package, by Eric Haines, September 28, 1993
- SPD Platform/Compiler Results, by David Hook, September 28, 1993
- Recursive Grids and Ray Bounding Box Comments and Timings, by Andrew Woo, December 2, 1997
-
BART: A Benchmark for Animated Ray Tracing,
by Jonas Lext,
Ulf Assarsson, and Tomas Moller, July 16, 2000
-
Global Illumination Test Scenes,
by Brian Smits and
Henrik Wann Jensen, July 16, 2000
- Comparison of Spatial Data Structures and Ray Tracers
- Poll: What efficiency schemes have you used?, August 29, 1989
- Algorithm Order Discussion, by Masataka Ohta, Pete Shirley, October 1, 1990
(computational complexity)
- 5D vs. BSP and ABVH, by Nguyen Duc Cuong, January 18, 1996
- Comparison of Hierarchical Grids, by Vlastimil Havran and Filip Sixta, June 25, 1999
- A Summary of Octree Ray Traversal Algorithms, by Vlastimil Havran, December 21, 1999
- Efficiency Tricks, by Eric Haines, March 26, 1988
(little optimizations for ray tracing)
- Efficiency Schemes, edited by Eric Haines, October 27, 1989
(similar to the previous)
- Comments on Various Ray Tracing Speedups, by Andrew Woo, July 1, 1993
- Faster Refraction Formula, and Transmission Color Filtering, by Xavier Bec, January 21, 1997
- Z-buffer and Raytracing, by Sam Paik, December 21, 1999
- Importance for Ray Tracing, by Per H. Christensen, December 21, 1999
-
Realtime Techniques for Ray Tracing,
by Ádám Nagy, Eric Haines,
Russel Simmons, Paul Kahler, Factory, and Bruno Schödlbauer, July 16, 2000
-
Processor and Compiler Comparison as of August 2001, by John Stone, August 9, 2001
-
Array Good, Linked List Bad, by Matt Pharr, October 21, 2002
- Processor Level Optimization Verification,by Paul Kahler and Anonymous, December 12, 2005
- Notes on Efficient Ray Tracing, by Solomon Boulos and Eric Haines, September 30, 2006
Optimizing Shadow Testing
- Bounding Box Intersection
(also see Hierarchical Bounding Volumes)
- Bounding Box Intersection, edited by Eric Haines, October 27, 1989
- Bounding Volumes (Sphere vs. Box), by Tom Wilson, January 27, 1993
- Bounding Box Intersection via Origin Location, by Eric Haines, August 9, 2001
-
Efficient Bounding Box Intersection, by Brian Smits, October 21, 2002
- Ray/Box Intersection Optimization, by Eric Haines, Solomon Boulos, and Pete Shirley, September 30, 2006
- Polygons, Point-in-Polygon Testing
- Ray/Triangle Intersection with Barycentric Coordinates, by Rod Bogart, Jeff Arenberg, November 4, 1988
- Point in Polygon, One More Time... by Mark Vandewettering, Eric Haines, Edward John Kalenda, Richard Parent, Sam Uselton, "Zap" Andersson, and Bruce Holloway, October 1, 1990
- Quadrant Counting Polygon In/Out Testing, by Craig Kolb, Ken McElvain, October 1, 1990
- Point in Polygon, September 2, 1992
- Bounding Areas for Ray/Polygon Intersection, by Steve Worley and Eric Haines, January 27, 1993
- Simple, Fast Triangle Intersection, by Chris Green and Steve Worley, January 27, 1993
- Simple, Fast Triangle Intersection, part II, by John Spackman, July 1, 1993
- Point in Polygon, the Quick Answer, by Wm. Randolph Franklin and Eric Haines, February 2.01, 1994
(short code)
- A Storage Trick for 3D Polygons, by Eric Haines, July 6, 1994
(save 4 or 8 bytes per vertex)
- Detecting Points on the Edge of a Polygon, by Eric Haines, June 26, 1997
- Rendering Unflat Polygons, by Eric Haines, June 26, 1997
- Even Faster Crossings Test, by Philip Brown, December 2, 1997
- Cyrus-Beck as a Ray/Polygon Tester, by David Rogers, December 2, 1997
- Origins of Point In Polygon, Take 10..., by Neil Stewart, July 11, 1998
-
Intersecting a Ray and a Triangle with Plücker Coordinates,
by
Ray Jones, July 16, 2000
-
Faster Yet Point in Polygon Test? by Stephen Bridgett
- Tetrahedron Testing
- Quadric Surfaces
- Primitive/Box Overlap Testing by Ruud Waaj, Paul Heckbert, Andrew Glassner, March 8, 1988
(which voxels should list a given primitive?)
- More Comments on Tight Fitting Octrees for Quadrics, by Jeff Goldsmith, March 26, 1988
- C Code for Intersecting Quadrics, by Prem Subrahmanyam, March 20, 1990
- Tori and Quartic Root-Finding
- Parametric Surfaces (e.g. Bicubic Patches)
- Spline Surface Rendering, and What's Wrong with Octrees, by Eric Haines, January 15, 1988
(how to choose octree subdivision criteria for parametric surfaces)
- Spline Surface Intersection, edited by Eric Haines, October 27, 1989
- Ray with Bicubic Patch Intersection Problem, Wayne Knapp, John Peterson, et al, July 13, 1990
- Spline Patch Ray Intersection Routines, by Sean Graves, August 26, 1992
- Ray Tracing Procedural & Parametric Surfaces, by Mark VandeWettering, Stephen Westin, and Matt Pharr, December 21, 1999
- Implicit Surfaces
- Ray Transformation, by Kendall Bennett, January 27, 1993
(generating eye rays)
- Shadows from Refractive Objects, by Steven Collins, September 28, 1993
- Shadows Through Transmitters, by Eric Haines, Greg Ward, Alexander Enzmann, Stephen Coy, and David Hook, September 28, 1993
- Obfuscated Postscript Ray Tracer, by Takashi Hayakawa, July 1, 1993
(this is insane!)
- Distribution Ray Tracing, by Marc Levoy, July 6, 1994
(email to Levoy's graphics class)
- Interacting with Ray Traces, by Bert Peers, January 18, 1996
- Total Internal Reflection, by Eric Haines, Greg Ward, and Chris Larson, January 18, 1996
- Ray Tracing, What is it Good For? by Arijan Siska, January 21, 1997
- Progressive Ray Tracing and Fast Previews, by Eric Haines, January 21, 1997
- More on Rendering Bugs, by Eric Haines, June 26, 1997
- Raytracker Tricks, by Hakan "Zap" Andersson, December 2, 1997
- Mirror Reflectivity, by Greg W. Larson, December 2, 1997
- Recent Ray Tracing European Conference Papers, July 11, 1998
- Attenuation in Water, by Bretton Wade and Ian Ashdown, July 11, 1998
- Raytracing Gloss/Translucency, by Peter Eastman, Matt Pharr, and Stephen Westin, December 21, 1999
-
Fastest Way to Generate Eye Rays in Ray Tracing,
by Samuel Paik, July 16, 2000
-
Volumetric Rendering,
by Paul Kahler, July 16, 2000
-
Recent Papers,
summarized by Eric Haines and Vlastimil Havran, July 16, 2000
- True Integration of Linear/Area Lights, by Kevin Picott, January 2, 1990
- Ray Tracing Penumbral Shadows, Prem Subrahmanyam, July 13, 1990
- Soft Shadow Ideas, compiled by Derek Woolverton, August 26, 1992
- Fast Soft Shadows, by Steve Worley, January 21, 1997
- Great Shadow Hack,, summarized by Eric Haines, June 25, 1999
- Projective Mapping Explanation, by Ken "Turk" Turkowski, October 13, 1989
- A Note on Texture Sampling, by Eric Haines, March 20, 1990
(texture filtering)
- Getting Rid of the Divide, by Frank Compagner and Bob Pendleton, January 18, 1996
- Synthetic Textures and Genetic Algorithms, by Steve Worley, January 21, 1997
- The Curse of the Monkey's Paw, by Eric Haines, June 26, 1997
- Lifting the Monkey's Paw Curse, by Jeff Goldsmith, December 2, 1997
- Radiosity via Ray Tracing, by Pete Shirley, October 1, 1990
- Simple Databases Available For Rendering (Global Illumination), by Peter Shirley, July 6, 1994
- Hierarchical Techniques for Glossy Global Illumination, by Per Christensen, January 18, 1996
- What's Wrong with Monte-Carlo Methods? by Nguyen D.C. (JuHu), Pete Shirley, Stephen Westin, and Eric Veach, June 26, 1997
- European Graphics Tour, by Nelson Max, June 26, 1997
- Declassified CIA BRDFs now available, by Greg Ward Larson, December 2, 1997
- 13th Annual Eurographics Workshop on Rendering, by Nelson L. Max, October 21, 2002
- Correcting Normal Direction, by Gavin Bell, October 13, 1994
- Eccentricity Effects in Blobs, by Alfonso Hermida, December 2, 1997
- Polygon Shrinking, by Dave Rusin and Jeff Erickson, July 11, 1998
- Correcting Normals on "Flipped" Polygons, by Kev, Duncan Colvin, Steve Baker, John Nagle, Dennis Jiang, Alejo Hausner, and Eric Haines, July 11, 1998
- Order of Rendering and Fast Texturing, by Bruno Levy, Dan Piponi and Bernie Roehl, May 16, 1995
(per pixel cost of Gouraud, Phong, texture mapping)
- Cells and Portals Resources, by Randy Stiles, January 27, 1997
- Plücker Coordinates, by Jeff Erickson, December 2, 1997
- Testing a Matrix for Uniform Scaling, by Charles Iliya Krempeaux and Eduardo Marreiros, December 2, 1997
- Plücker Coordinate Tutorial, by Ken Shoemake, July 11, 1998
- Info on REYES Algorithm, by Robert Speranza and Tom Duff, July 11, 1998
- What's Mesa? by Brian Paul, July 11, 1998
- Multithreading Mesa, by John Stone, July 11, 1998
- On Transforming Planes,
by Steve Hollasch, July 16, 2000
- Triangles per Vertex, by Eric Haines, August 9, 2001
- Scanline vs. Ray Tracing, by Piero Foscari, Paul Kahler, and Matt Pharr, October 21, 2002
- A Simple Ray-Triangle Plücker Optimization, by Jeffrey Mahovsky, October 21, 2002
- Recovering a Triangle's Surface Normal from the Plücker Coordinates of its Edges,
by Jeffrey Mahovsky, October 21, 2002
- OpenEXR and Radiance Floating Point Image File Formats,
by Simon Bunker,
Steve Westin, and Greg Ward
- Raytraced Games,
by Greg Alt
- Randomly Sampling Bounding Volumes,
by Philipp Slusallek, Pete Shirley,
Fredo Durand, and more
- Ray Tracing's Roots,
by Juan Rayces, Andrew Glassner, Jonathan Maxwell,
Phil Dutre, and Chris Trendall
-
More on Randomly Sampling Bounding Volumes,
by Mateu Sbert
-
SIGGRAPH 2005 Report,
by Eric Haines
- "So long and thanks for all the fish...",
from Michael Ashikhmin, comments by Eric Haines, September 30, 2006
- SIGGRAPH 2006 Report,
by Eric Haines, September 30, 2006
- Advice to Authors, by Anonymae
(advice on writing a book)
- Newish Books (2005), by Eric Haines
- Good Computer Graphics Books, by Brent McPherson
- 3D Computer Animation, by John Vince
- 3D Graphic File Formats: A Programmers Reference, by Keith Rule
- 3D with HOOPS, by William Leier and Jim Merry
- Advanced Rendering and Animation Techniques: Theory and Practice, by Alan and Mark Watt
- Adventures in Ray Tracing, by Alfonso Hermida
- The Algorithm Design Manual, by Steven Skiena
- Computational Geometry in C, by Joseph O'Rourke
- Computer Graphics, by Don Hearn and Pauline Baker
- CRC Handbook of Discrete and Computational Geometry, edited by Jacob Goodman and Joseph O'Rourke
- Create Stereograms on Your PC, by Dan Richardson
- Encyclopedia of Graphics File Formats, by James Murray & William vanRyper
- The Geometry Toolbox, by Gerald Farin and Dianne Hansford
- Graphical Treasures of the Internet, by Bridget Mintz
- Graphics File Formats, by David Kay and John Levine
- Graphics Gems IV, edited by Paul Heckbert
- Graphics Programming with Direct3D, by Robert Glidden
- Hidden Images: Making Random Dot Stereograms, by Bob Hankinson and Alfonso Hermida
- An Introduction to Implicit Surfaces, edited by Jules Bloomenthal
- An Introduction to Ray Tracing, edited by Andrew Glassner
- The Inventor Mentor, by Josie Wernecke
- Jim Blinn's Corner, by Jim Blinn
- Making Movies on Your PC, by David Mason and Alexander Enzmann
- Numerical Recipes, by William Press et al.
- Object-Oriented Ray Tracing in C++, by Nicholas Wilt
- Photorealism and Ray Tracing in C, by Christopher Watkins, Stephen Coy, and Mark Finlay
- Photorealistic Rendering in Computer Graphics, edited by Pere Brunet and Frederik Jansen
- Practical Ray Tracing in C, by Craig Lindley
- Procedural Elements for Computer Graphics, 2nd edition, by David Rogers
- Principles of Digital Image Synthesis, by Andrew Glassner
- Programming for Graphics Files in C and C++, by John Levine
- Radiosity: A Programmer's Perspective, by Ian Ashdown
- Radiosity and Global Illumination, by Francois Sillion and Claude Puech
- Ray Tracing Creations, by Drew Wells and Chris Young
- Rendering with Radiance: The Art and Science of Lighting Visualization, Greg Ward Larson and Rob Shakespeare
- Stereogram Programming Techniques, by Christopher Watkins & Vincent Mallette
- Texturing and Modeling: A Procedural Approach, edited by David Ebert
- Tricks of the Graphics Gurus, by Dick Oliver, Scott Anderson, James McCord, Spyro Gumas, and Bob Zigon
- December 12, 2005
- May 11, 2004
- October 21, 2002
- August 9, 2001
- July 16, 2000
- December 21, 1999
- June 25, 1999
- July 11, 1998
- December 2, 1997
- June 26, 1997
- January 21, 1997
- January 18, 1996
- August 2, 1995
- May 16, 1995
- January 23, 1995
- October 13, 1994
- July 14, 1994
- July 6, 1994
- February 2.01, 1994
- February 2, 1994
- September 28, 1993
- July 1, 1993
- January 27, 1993
- August 26, 1992
- July 10, 1992
Index created by Paul Heckbert, October 5, 1996
Updated by Eric Haines, December 12, 2005