Ray tracing surfaces of revolution: An old problem with a new perspective

In this paper we present a new subdivision scheme that is shown to improve the performance of ray tracing surfaces of revolution over Kajiya's classical work [8]. This is based on a monotonic interval partitioning of a generatrix of a surface of revolution. The algorithm has a search complexity upper bound of O(log(m n)) for m monotonic intervals and n subdivisions for each interval and runs up to three times faster on large scenes. This method also suggests a novel hybrid bounding volume scheme that reduces the number of intersection tests between a ray and the actual object surface.