Tessellation-free geometric queries on displaced surfaces cut caustics variance 10x
ssh4net · x · 2026-10-16
A paper by Bing Xu, Yang Zhou and Brian Budge introduces a first-order texture-space hierarchy enabling ray intersection, specular manifold search, surface sampling, and closest-point queries directly on tessellation-free displaced surfaces. Each node stores a local affine height plane plus a conservative residual bound, removing the memory-heavy pre-tessellation step. Equal-time comparisons against unbiased/biased SMS show over 10x variance reduction for caustics without energy loss; the underwater demo scene is fully path traced with displaced water, volcano, and emissive coral surfaces.
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