Direct Ray Tracing of Displacement Mapped Triangles

Abstract

We present an algorithm for ray tracing displacement maps that requires no additional storage over the base model. Displacement maps are rarely used in ray tracing due to the cost associated with storing and intersecting the displaced geometry. This is unfortunate because displacement maps allow the addition of large amounts of geometric complexity into models. Our method works for models composed of triangles with normals at the vertices. In addition, we discuss a special purpose displacement that creates a smooth surface that interpolates the triangle vertices and normals of a mesh. The combination allows relatively coarse models to be displacement mapped and ray traced effectively.