How does OptiX expect geometric primitives to be stored in device memory?

Gaming and Visualization Technologies Visualization OptiX
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I’ve been reading documentation for OptiX 7.6, specifically the Programming Guide for about a week now to try to get a feel for things. I understand the basic structure of the RTX API I think, but I can’t seem to nail down what native format the geometry primitives are in when OptiX routines are running. I think I ran into a couple opaque types and kind of moved on. I’m confused because I’ve seen a few different examples that seem to do things very differently.

I have the SDK. Could someone point me to documentation or a code sample where I can see explicitly how I need to manipulate, say, mesh data to get it into device memory? Maybe the scene type and acceleration structure is just obfuscating things for me.

Context: I don’t care about rendering. I want to take a fixed set of rays and intersect them with my scene. I know how to do that, but the scene loading just isn’t making sense yet.

I’d greatly appreciate any insight. Thanks!

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Have a look at the optixPathTracer sample; the geometry is provided explicitly as const arrays in host memory before being copied to the GPU.

I know you read the Guide, but for reference, the formats are described starting in section 5.1 “Primivite Build Inputs” https://raytracing-docs.nvidia.com/optix7/guide/index.html#acceleration_structures#primitive-build-inputs

Triangle mesh build inputs are described as an array of floats, three per vertex. Optionally you can provide an index buffer, which is an array of integers, three per triangle. Curves and spheres have similarly simple in-memory formats.

–
David.

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Similar introduction code which builds some simple geometry shapes (plane, box, sphere, torus) can be found inside the OptiX 7 Advanced Examples.
https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/optix-advanced-samples-on-github/48410/3

If you look at the createGeometry() function in the github link below, that’s basically textbook code for building a geometry acceleration structure (GAS) for built-in triangle primitives.
https://github.com/NVIDIA/OptiX_Apps/blob/master/apps/intro_runtime/src/Application.cpp#L1361

Also explained inside the OptiX Programming Guide chapter about acceleration structures.

It’s called by all of the runtime generated shapes, for example, the box here which consists of only 12 triangles.
https://github.com/NVIDIA/OptiX_Apps/blob/master/apps/intro_runtime/src/Box.cpp
Note that the acceleration structure only uses the vertex position of the four vertex attributes (vertex position, tangent, normal, texcoord) defined there.