Frustum Casting for Progressive, Interactive Rendering
Seth J. Teller, J. Alex · DSpace@MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) · 1998
Efficient visible surface determination algorithms have long been a fundamental goal of computer graphics. We discuss the well-known ray casting problem: given a geometric scene description, a synthetic camera, and a viewport which discretizes the camera film plane into pixels, ray casting identifies the visible surface at each pixel, i.e., that scene primitive which is first encountered by an eye ray directed through the pixel center. Interactive rendering systems have not ordinarily been based on ray casting, due to its computational cost. Instead, the dominant method for achieving interactive rendering is hardware-assisted rasterization and depth buffering of polygons, often produced by static or dynamic tesselation of higher-level objects. Modern polygon rasterization architectures are extremely powerful, having undergone an extensive development path. Several trends indicate, however, that alternatives to polygon rasterization and depth buffering deserve examination in the design ...