STUDY OF SURFACE REPRESENTATION METHODS BASED ON SIGNED DISTANCE FUNCTIONS

The paper studies surface rendering methods based on ray tracing for representations based on signed distance functions. The main objects of interest were the rendering algorithm execution time, the amount of memory occupied, and the accuracy of the surface representation estimated by the render using the PSNR metric. Six different representations and four intersection search algorithms were analyzed. In all cases, a bounding volume hierarchy was used as an accelerating structure. The comparison revealed promising representations and algorithms and showed that distance functions in some cases are not inferior to polygonal models in speed, while they can win in terms of memory consumption and represent the surface with a good level of accuracy.