US 2019/0156550 A1Published application

Ray-triangle intersection testing with tetrahedral planes

AssigneeMicrosoft Technology Licensing, LLC

InventorJames D. Stanard

Life of this patent

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Abstract

Various approaches to performing ray-triangle intersection tests for single triangles or clusters of triangles are presented. In some example implementations, the triangles are organized in tetrahedral clusters, and the ray-triangle intersection tests use plane data for sets of planes of the tetrahedral clusters. A triangle can be represented as three bounding planes. Further, in some example implementations, the same three bounding planes of a tetrahedral cluster can be used to represent one, two, or three triangles that define faces of that tetrahedral cluster. With this configuration, overall memory costs are reduced when the same plane data is used to represent multiple triangles, and operations to check for ray-triangle intersections are still computationally efficient.

Claims20

Dependent claims

One or more computer-readable media storing computer-executable instructions for causing a computer system, when programmed thereby, to perform operations to test for ray-triangle intersections during ray tracing in a computer-represented environment that includes multiple triangles, the operations comprising:

selecting multiple non-coplanar adjacent triangles in a tetrahedral cluster, wherein a different plane, among a set of planes of the tetrahedral cluster, includes each of the selected triangles;
and
using plane data for the set of planes of the tetrahedral cluster to determine intersection points and barycentric weights for the selected triangles, including, for each of the selected triangles:
using plane data for the plane that includes the selected triangle to determine an intersection point between a ray and the plane that includes the selected triangle;
using plane data for other planes in the set of planes of the tetrahedral cluster to compute barycentric weights of the intersection point;
and
using the barycentric weights to determine if the intersection point is inside the selected triangle.

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