Abstract

In this thesis, we introduce a simple but efficient hybrid ray tracing system for triangular meshes. Different from the existing pure point or polygon ray tracing systems, the traced models are represented and rendered by both points and triangles. We accept triangle meshes as input, and hierarchically build up a multi-resolution tree structure with intermediate nodes as points and leaf nodes as triangles. The trade-off between rendering portions of a model with points or with triangles is made automatically based on the screen contribution of each node. Our system balances the quantity of a mesh model with its quality, reflects the level-of-detail representation and selection, maintains the simplicity of the point primitive, and allows for producing high quality ray traced images with more advanced illumination models and global illumination.