RAY TRACING BEZIER SURFACE

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