[Bf-committers] BIH acceleration structure?

[Yves Poissant]

Hi there,

I'm new here so let me introduce myself. I have 27 years of experience in 
software development and I worked on different application types basically 
from accounting applications, to stock management systems, to graphical 
teletext delivery systems, to natural language based help systems, to 
autonomous navigation robot systems, to multimedia and game based 
educational products, to e-learning, to 3D animation system.

3D programming is not new for me since I've been involved in 3D applications 
since I started programming, even in the days of vector graphics. I wrote my 
first renderer in Pascal 20 years ago. I just finished a 3 year contract at 
Hash Inc programming 3D rendering technologies such as soft shadows, soft 
reflections, Ambient Occlusion, Image Based Lighting, Photon Mapping, 
Subsurface Scattering and a few optimizations to the ray-tracing 
acceleration structure for Animation:Master.

I'm also an artist. I did illustrations and painting, graphics design, 
comics and animation. I currently have a short animation film project going 
on and I'm in the character and environment design stage. The project is 
based on a song from a local artist here and I'm looking for using Blender 
for that animation project so I've been evaluating Blender for a couple 
months now.

Some of the render tests I did revealed the common "teapot in the stadium" 
issue with the octtree acceleraton structure. That is when the scene is 
large but only a small portion of the scene contains the bulk of the shot, 
the octtree size must be maxed and the render time increases quite a lot.

I already have a lot of experience (both theoretical and pragmatic) with the 
different acceleration structures and I would like to try to implement a BIH 
in Blender. However, I'd like to know if anybody might already be working on 
such a change before I embark on this project because I would not like to 
duplicate someone else's efforts. I found an entry in the wiki somewhere 
where someone from the University of Toronto was working on implementing a 
BIH but apparently, this never got delivered.

Also, I'm not quite sure what are the custom for such a project. Do I need 
to submit something and/or does such a project needs to be approved in some 
way?

Any guidance as to how to proceed, or even a go/no-go advise, would be 
appreciated.

Regards
Yves Poissant
www.ypoart.com