scott <sco### [at] scottcom> wrote:
> >> When thinking about optimising distance field renderers I always get a
> >> feeling that you should be able to do something clever with voronoi
> >> diagrams but I have never worked out what yet...
> >
> > Hmm. Are you talking about breaking up the DE into separate regions, so that no
> > particular region will have too many components (shape operations)? If so, what
> > happens when a shadow or reflection ray needs to travel between regions?
>
> Yes, I'm thinking that with complex scenes I am still always computing
> the distance field for every single object. What I think would speed
> things up is if you could group objects together and create a kind of
> much simpler conservative "group" distance function. I guess a kind of
> n-tree structure where you only need to do a relatively cheap check at
> each level to rule out certain nodes that you don't need to go down and
> evaluate any further. I guess POV does something similar.
>
> You would do this for every distance field evaluation, so it wouldn't
> matter if a ray jumped from one region to another.

Right. I was either working off an incomplete thought from last year, or another
problem altogether :/

> I'm also not sure if such a scheme would actually make much improvement
> on a GPU.

Maybe voronoi diagrams aren't needed. Perhaps a simple 'buckets' system would
suffice, where space is divided into cubic cells, with each cell containing just
a few objects. Of course, any object overlapping cell boundaries will have to be
held in more than one bucket...

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