> Culling is of little use for ray-tracing, it is a typical scanline render
> acceleration technique.
> 
I was talking about culling as a technique to keep the mesh include file 
small. Because if you have a 100 million triangle mesh of a planet but 
only see 5% of them, you can try and do viewport culling -- otherwise 
the mesh will not fit into memory. 

>And I am sure somebody has already invented a method for fitting huge
>meshes such that they can be used by ray-tracing 
>
What about 1 byte per triangle? 

It only works for planets with 2 byte height info with the height 
info being the height difference to a sphere surface. 

If I have time, maybe I'll implement that. 

The general problem is that each vertex uses up at least 3*4 bytes. 
The only way I could imagine saving space is a better triangle-to-vertex 
mapping. 

Or, in-memory compression...

Yes, one could do in-memory compression when using a hierarchy. 
It will probably even be faster than using swap memory for the mesh. 

Wolfgang

Post a reply to this message