Automatic Hybrid Hierarchy Creation: a Cost-model Based Approach

While using hierarchical search structures has been proved as one of the most efficient acceleration techniques when rendering complex scenes, automatic creation of appropriate hierarchies is not solved yet. Well-known algorithms for automatic creation of bounding volume hierarchies are not enough. Higher performance is achieved by introducing spatial uniform subdivision, although algorithms proposed up to now are not truly automatic, as they need some parameters to be adjusted. In this paper we present a full-automatic hierarchy creation scheme that structures the scene in a hybrid way, combining bounding volumes and voxel grids in the same tree, selecting the search structure that best fits to each scene region. It uses no parameters at all. This efficient proposal relies on a new cost model that estimates the goodness of a hybrid hierarchy if used for rendering the scene