SIGGRAPH 2026 Talk- A Hybrid BVH Structure for Interactive GPU Ray Tracing

At SIGGRAPH 2026, my teammate Andrew Bauer and I have a talk about the hybrid BVH structure we use in Disney Animation’s in-house real-time GPU ray tracing previsualization renderer1. Our hybrid BVH structure is specifically designed around optimizing for 24 fps or better animation playback in large, complex production scenes. I think the cool thing about this talk is that it’s not really about some kind of revolutionary magic new technique, but instead is about closely analyzing a specific problem domain and exploiting properties of the problem domain to accomplish otherwise difficult things. Andrew is presenting the talk at SIGGRAPH 2026 in Los Angeles as part of the “Rendering and Volumes” session on Thursday, July 23rd. Here is the paper abstract: Choosing a bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) structure for accelerating ray tracing applications typically involves trading off between BVH build/update speed and BVH traversal speed. Two-level BVHs offer faster build/update speeds but…