Simplification Culling of Static and Dynamic Scene Graphs
Carl Erikson, Dinesh Manocha · 1998
We present a new approach for simplifying large polygonal environments composed of hundreds or thousands of objects. Our algorithm represents the environment using a scene graph and automatically computes levels of detail (LOD) for each node in the graph. For drastic simplification, the algorithm uses hierarchical levels of detail (HLOD) to represent the simplified geometry of whole portions of the scene graph. When HLOD are rendered, the algorithm can ignore these portions, thereby performing simplification culling. For dynamic environments, HLOD are incrementally computed on the fly. The algorithm is applicable to all models and involves no user intervention. It generates high quality and drastic simplifications and has been applied to CAD models composed of hundreds of thousands of polygons. In practice, it achieves significant speedups in rendering large static and dynamic environments with little loss in image quality. Keywords: simplification, levels-of-detail, dynamic, environ...