Recently, I presented a bit of my work at the High-Performance graphics conference on compressing a relatively new kind of Vulkan® and DirectX® graphics object: the Opacity Micromap. This object is intended to be used as a relatively cheap memory hint to the hardware ray-tracing pipeline to attempt to cut down on the number of times the expensive AnyHit shader has to be called.

It may still be relatively big however; so in this work we introduce a way to interpret the micromap as a tree structure that in turn can be compressed in a very efficient way: Up to 110 times in some actual content.

You can find the presentation, the slides, and the paper itself among my publications.

A while back now, I attended the Blender Conference in Amsterdam where I presented a bit of the work I had done related to Blender, glTF and Opacity Micromaps. Despite the 50-min presentation though, I still had a lot of content over that I had to cut out in the interest of time (and presentation coherency). I had hoped to include much of that in this write-up shortly after the conference, but I ended up swamped with work from both Arm and several looming paper deadlines, so I had to postpone it. But here it is now, so better late than never I guess!

Links to the presentation, as well as the slides I used can be found on my publications and presentations page.