Simple C/C++ library for triangle-intersection acceleration structure

Question

I'm raytracing and would like to speed it up via some acceleration structure (kd-tree, BVH, whatever). I don't want to code it up myself. What I've tried so far:

• Yanking the kd-tree out of pbrt. There are so many intra-dependencies that I couldn't succeed at this without pulling all of pbrt into my code.

• CGAL's AABB tree. Frustratingly, this seems to return only the point of intersection. Without knowing which triangle the point came from, I can't efficiently interpolate color over the triangle. I'd love to just extend the notion of "Point" with color, but this doesn't seem possible without writing a lot of template code from scratch.

• Writing my own. Okay so I wrote my own grid acceleration class, and it works, but it's nasty and inefficient.

So, if anyone can suggest a simple library that I can use for this purpose I'd really appreciate it! All I need is given a triangle soup and ray, find the closest intersection and return the index of that triangle.

Answer 1

Jaco Bikker wrote this series of tutorials: http://www.devmaster.net/articles/raytracing_series/part7.php

They're very helpful and he includes code at the end for a ray tracer using a kd-tree.

You might be able to use that.

Answer 2

The G3D engine has a ray tracing implementation. Not sure how efficient it is though. It shouldn't bee too much trouble to use the Tree implementation without the rest of the library.