Patent ID: 8669977

Claim:
A method, comprising: quantizing triangles of a scene on a global grid, such that adjoining triangles are snapped together; encoding the vertex positions of the triangles as variable length bit strings; modeling the connectivity of the triangles; and constructing a compact bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) that represents at least a portion of the scene, wherein the method is performed by a processor configured to perform graphics processing, wherein said encoding of vertex positions comprises: for each of vertex, computing a delta vector D i ={x i , y i , z i }, where each component of D i indicates the distance of the vertex, along the dimension of the component, from the closest plane of the bounding box that includes the vertex, where the closest plane is perpendicular to the dimension and is either the plane containing the origin or the plane opposite to the plane containing the origin; over all vertices in the bounding box, determining the largest x, y, and z components from among the delta vectors of the respective vertices, max (x i ), max (y i ), max (z i ); determining the number of bits (n x , n y , n z ) needed to encode max (x i ), max (y i ), and max (z i ) respectively; encoding (n x , n y , n z ), wherein the encoded (n x , n y , n z ) are followed by the delta vectors of the vertices; and adding an extra bit to each of x i , y i , z i , wherein the extra bit identifies the closest plane.