@phdthesis{a3e44c34-25b6-455c-9afa-885e9df26625,
  abstract     = {{In computer graphics, there are numerous aspects that must be considered when rendering images of virtual scenes:<br/><br/>What physical light-generating phenomena do we care about? How should object and material surfaces be described? And how should these be stored to ensure as fast and efficient image rendering as possible?<br/><br/>As a part of this thesis, a method for rendering images of scenes lit by virtual atomic particles traveling at superluminal speeds is presented that handles both the particle interactions and light generation in a unified ray-tracing framework.<br/><br/>However, this form of ray-tracing can be very time-consuming. Thus, this work includes an investigation into accelerating one aspect of this process: Parallelizing the construction of the spatial split bounding volume hierarchy in a simple and straightforward way with the OpenMP framework.<br/><br/>A similar ray-tracing process is then optimized for real-time rendering of partially-transparent triangle meshes by efficiently leveraging and compressing a structure known as micromaps that enables ray-tracing to work more efficiently for various alpha-masked geometries such as grass and foliage.<br/><br/>This structure is subsequently generalized and extended to arbitrary surface attributes, with a thorough analysis of its performance, quality trade-offs, and potential future use-cases in the hardware accelerated real-time ray-tracing pipeline.}},
  author       = {{Waldemarson, Gustaf}},
  isbn         = {{978-91-8104-872-8}},
  issn         = {{1404-1219}},
  keywords     = {{Rendering; Ray-Tracing; Acceleration Structures; Micromaps; Particles}},
  language     = {{eng}},
  month        = {{04}},
  publisher    = {{Department of Computer Science, Lund University}},
  school       = {{Lund University}},
  series       = {{Dissertation}},
  title        = {{Rendering Small Things : Hardware Micromaps and Particles}},
  url          = {{https://lup.lub.lu.se/search/files/246130798/thesis-digital.pdf}},
  year         = {{2026}},
}