Methods for Fast Construction of Bounding Volume Hierarchies

The bounding volume hierarchy is one of the most common acceleration data structures used in computer graphics. This thesis is about a fast parallel construction of bounding volume hierarchies on the GPU. Two construction algorithms were implemented the CUDA technology. The first algorithm is based on Morton codes and spatial median splits. The second algorithm uses the surface area heuristic to minimize the cost of the hierarchy. Both algorithms were tested in the real-time rendering system. The core of the rendering system is based on an efficient ray tracer.