Parallel Transformation of Bounding Volume Hierarchies into Oriented Bounding Box Trees

Abstract

AbstractOriented bounding box (OBB) hierarchies can be used instead of hierarchies based on axis‐aligned bounding boxes (AABB), providing tighter fitting to the underlying geometric structures and resulting in improved interference tests, such as ray‐geometry intersections. In this paper, we present a method for the fast, parallel transformation of an existing bounding volume hierarchy (BVH), based on AABBs, into a hierarchy based on oriented bounding boxes. To this end, we parallelise a high‐quality OBB extraction algorithm from the literature to operate as a standalone OBB estimator and further extend it to efficiently build an OBB hierarchy in a bottom up manner. This agglomerative approach allows for fast parallel execution and the formation of arbitrary, high‐quality OBBs in bounding volume hierarchies. The method is fully implemented on the GPU and extensively evaluated with ray intersections.