> I have implemented simple kd-tree support for my renderer ssRay and it
> already rocks! See the image attached. Now I can finally use more
> interesting models and render complex scenes without unbearable
> performance hit.

Wow that's really cool that you have done this all yourself so quickly, at 
this rate you'll be ahead of POV in a few months :-)

> Now the kd-tree is build with idiotic spatial median subdivision (ie.
> simply divide each node in half). That is stupid and I'll implement a
> surface area heuristic cost model next. That should improve performance
> considerably. But still, all looks pretty good so far!

I guess the goal here is to have the minimum number of steps down the 
kd-tree on average over all rays.  My very naive instinct is that you should 
split the nodes so there are equal numbers of triangles on each side, but 
that's probably wrong if you don't take into account the size of each 
triangle.

> I love this path tracing stuff :D

Yes if you have the time it can produce beautiful results, I have been using 
MCPov almost exclusively recently for renders, I hope that path-tracing can 
make it into official POV at some point.

BTW I have two questions about your tracer:

1) Multi-threaded, this can't be harder than running multiple instances at 
once, but does it already utilise all cores or how hard will it be to 
implement that?

2) How do you describe the scenes at the moment, are they all hard coded or 
do you have some scripting system already?

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