Efficient Space Skipping and Adaptive Sampling of Unstructured Volumes Using Hardware Accelerated Ray Tracing

Abstract: Sample based ray marching is an effective method for direct volume rendering of unstructured meshes. However, sampling such meshes remains expensive, and strategies to reduce the number of samples taken have received relatively little attention. In this paper, we introduce a method for rendering unstructured meshes using a combination of a coarse spatial acceleration structure and hardware-accelerated ray tracing. Our approach enables efficient empty space skipping and adaptive sampling of unstructured meshes, and outperforms a reference ray marcher by up to 7x.