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Color and attribute micromaps

Waldemarson, Gustaf LU orcid and Doggett, Michael LU orcid (2026)
Abstract
The hardware accelerated ray-tracing pipeline presents many opportunities to implement more advanced rendering algorithms than earlier rasterization based approaches. However, one particular aspect of the pipeline still remains a bit too costly to use in practice: The AnyHit-shader. Opacity Micromaps were introduced to alleviate this issue, but the central problem of calling arbitrary shader code on an unknown number of primitives remains prohibitively expensive. Thus, in this paper we take the first step of addressing this by further extending the concept of micromaps to arbitrary attributes; thereby theoretically giving the ray-tracing pipeline access to more generalized types of data. For this work, we focus on shading attributes, such... (More)
The hardware accelerated ray-tracing pipeline presents many opportunities to implement more advanced rendering algorithms than earlier rasterization based approaches. However, one particular aspect of the pipeline still remains a bit too costly to use in practice: The AnyHit-shader. Opacity Micromaps were introduced to alleviate this issue, but the central problem of calling arbitrary shader code on an unknown number of primitives remains prohibitively expensive. Thus, in this paper we take the first step of addressing this by further extending the concept of micromaps to arbitrary attributes; thereby theoretically giving the ray-tracing pipeline access to more generalized types of data. For this work, we focus on shading attributes, such as color, normal, metalness and roughness data, showcasing how their quality changes in a micromap-based setting, and what unique aspects they bring to the ray-tracing pipeline. Finally, we investigate how this could be used in existing shaders, and to implement various fixed-function operations during ray traversal that typically require the use of AnyHit-shaders. (Less)
Please use this url to cite or link to this publication:
author
and
organization
publishing date
type
Working paper/Preprint
publication status
submitted
subject
keywords
Ray-Tracing, Mesh models, Image compression
pages
11 pages
project
Efficient GPU Programming for Visual and Autonomous Systems
language
English
LU publication?
yes
id
c62ebc81-a094-4de3-a49c-e77db79ccd14
date added to LUP
2026-03-29 23:17:52
date last changed
2026-05-05 09:12:38
@misc{c62ebc81-a094-4de3-a49c-e77db79ccd14,
  abstract     = {{The hardware accelerated ray-tracing pipeline presents many opportunities to implement more advanced rendering algorithms than earlier rasterization based approaches. However, one particular aspect of the pipeline still remains a bit too costly to use in practice: The AnyHit-shader. Opacity Micromaps were introduced to alleviate this issue, but the central problem of calling arbitrary shader code on an unknown number of primitives remains prohibitively expensive. Thus, in this paper we take the first step of addressing this by further extending the concept of micromaps to arbitrary attributes; thereby theoretically giving the ray-tracing pipeline access to more generalized types of data. For this work, we focus on shading attributes, such as color, normal, metalness and roughness data, showcasing how their quality changes in a micromap-based setting, and what unique aspects they bring to the ray-tracing pipeline. Finally, we investigate how this could be used in existing shaders, and to implement various fixed-function operations during ray traversal that typically require the use of AnyHit-shaders.}},
  author       = {{Waldemarson, Gustaf and Doggett, Michael}},
  keywords     = {{Ray-Tracing; Mesh models; Image compression}},
  language     = {{eng}},
  month        = {{04}},
  note         = {{Preprint}},
  title        = {{Color and attribute micromaps}},
  year         = {{2026}},
}