Hardware accelerated ray-box intersection

GPU portable implementation of the ray-box intersection method of Smits (1998)
557 Downloads
Updated 13 Feb 2015

View License

% Ray-box intersection algorithm of Smit (1998) formatted for arrayfun to
% allow hardware acceleration:
% Smits, B. (1998). Efficiency issues for ray tracing. Journal of Graphics
% Tools, 3(2):1–14.
% Call with gpuarray and arrayfun to execute on the GPU: this
% may give two orders of magnitude speed up over vectorized
% cpu based implementation

% Ray box intersection is typically used to locate (axis aligned) spatial
% bins (e.g. octree bins / regular grid) to optimise ray-tracing (i.e. by
% reducing the number of potential triangles

% INPUT (scalar):
% orx, ory, orz: xyz componants of the ray origin
% Dx, Dy, Dz: xyz components of the ray directional (unit) vectors
% minx, miny, minz: xyz componants of the box minima
% maxx, maxy, maxz: xyz componants of the box maxima
% OUTPUT (scalar:
% tmin: minimum distance from from the ray-box intersection to the
% origin or nan if no intersection is located
% flag: 1 if intersection / 0 if no intersection

% Usage example:
% Step 1: convert mx3 direction vectors, D = [Dx Dy Dz] to gpuarray object
% >> gD = gpuArray(D);
% Step 2: call rayBoxGPU using arrayfun with scalar input formatting
% where min, max are the nx3 vertex lists of the box min-max corner points
% and where or is the xyz coordinates of the origin
% >> [tmin, flag] = arrayfun(@rayBoxGPU, min(:,1)', min(:,2)', min(:,3)', ...
% max(:,1)', max(:,2)', max(:,3)', ...
% or(:,1), or(:,2), or(:,3), ...
% gD(:,1),gD(:,2),gD(:,3));
% Step 3: recover data
% distmin = gather(tmin);
% flagBox = gather(flag);
% Output is one mxn array containing a the distance from the ray-box
% intersection to the origin or nan if no intersection is located (distmin)
% and one mxn logical containing flags for ray-box intersections.

% Per-ray flags can be obtained from the output tmin using the following
% method:
% >> flagB = true(size(D,1),1);
% >> flagB(sum(isnan(tmin),2) == size(min,1)) = false;
% This may save transfer time off the GPU

% Dependencies: requires Parallel Computing Toolbox
% Based upon the implementation by Jesus P. Mena-Chalco
% Test data (testDataBox.mat) is provided with the package

Cite As

Thomas Seers (2024). Hardware accelerated ray-box intersection (https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/49671-hardware-accelerated-ray-box-intersection), MATLAB Central File Exchange. Retrieved .

MATLAB Release Compatibility
Created with R2013a
Compatible with any release
Platform Compatibility
Windows macOS Linux
Categories
Find more on GPU Computing in Help Center and MATLAB Answers
Acknowledgements

Inspired by: Ray/box Intersection, RayShapeArticle_FEX.zip

Community Treasure Hunt

Find the treasures in MATLAB Central and discover how the community can help you!

Start Hunting!
Version Published Release Notes
1.1.0.0

Added acknowledgement to Paul Peeling's submission on FEX which the implementation takes from

1.0.0.0