Hi,
I've come across a pretty serious BVH build bug in the embree. Sometimes, spatial builders would build an empty tree, and the other builders would build a functional, but horribly slow tree. I was able to trace it to the code computing area of box in the file default.h:
/*! Box to use in the builders. */
typedef BBox Box;
/*! Computes half surface area of box. */
__forceinline float halfArea(const Box& box) {
ssef d = size(box);
ssef a = d*shuffle<1,2,0,3>(d);
return extract<0>(reduce_add(a));
}
Problematic part is the last line of the routine, that adds the fourth, undefined component of the sse vector into the result, resulting in an undefined behaviour.
It worked before I had made some changes in my code. I think the change that broke it was that I started using the second ID attribute of build triangles, which overlaps the fourth component a point vector, and that caused injection of random bits into the equation.
I've also noticed the same problem in the volume function, although that one is not used at the moment.
