Abstract:

A new algorithm for ray tracing bicubic bezicr surface intercection is presented. In order fo find the intersected patches more efficiently, a quadtree representation for surface patches is utilized.The introduction of the alternative binary tree subdivision of bczier surface effectively improves the performance of the ray surface intersection, with the benefits of avoiding the problem that the binary tree subdivision would produce long narrow patches and spee ding the intersection finding process.The algorithm has been programmed in FORTRAN-77 and on Prime-550 computer. The result shows that its structure is simple and it is easy to implement with good performance.

Key words: ray tracing, ray surface intersection, bounding box, alternative binary tree subdivision, a quadtree representation for surface