I am serving as a member of Shujian Ke’s Graduate Supervisory Committee. The committee includes Dr. Ashish Amresh (chair), Dr. John Femiani (member), and myself.

Thesis defense is scheduled on April 14, 2017, 11:30 am MST, Peralta Hall room 202.

Abstract

Subdivision surfaces have gained more and more traction since it became the standard surface representation in the movie industry for many years. And Catmull-Clark subdivision scheme is the most popular one for handling polygonal meshes. After its introduction, Catmull-Clark surfaces have been extended to several eminent ways, including the handling of boundaries, infinitely sharp creases, semi-sharp creases, and hierarchically defined detail. For ray tracing of subdivision surfaces, a common way is to construct spatial bounding volume hierarchies on top of input control mesh. However, a high-level refined subdivision surface not only requires a substantial amount of memory storage, but also causes slow and inefficient ray tracing. In this thesis, it presents a new way to improve the efficiency of ray tracing of subdivision surfaces, while the quality is not as good as general methods.