On speeding up ray tracing of B-spline surfaces (Q1109481)

This paper presents an algorithm that has been implemented to speed up the ray tracing of B-spline surfaces. The method uses bounding-box trees instead of the traditional bounding volumes, to effectively reduce the number of time-consuming ray-surface intersection calculations. A bounding-box tree il simple cases, this algorithm reduces the intersection problem to the problem of finding the roots of a single polynomial in one variable of minimal degree. This technique is fast, automatic, efficient and robust.