Efficient view-dependent out-of-core visualization
Michael Guthe, Pavel Borodin, Reinhard Klein · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2004
Hierarchical levels of details (HLODs) have proven to be an efficient way to visualize complex environments and models even in an out-of-core system. Large objects are partitioned into a spatial hierarchy and on each node a level of detail is generated for efficient view-dependent rendering. To ensure correct matching between adjacent nodes in the hierarchy care has to be taken to prevent cracks along the cuts. This either leads to severe simplification constraints at the cuts and thus to a significantly higher number of triangles or the need for a costly runtime stitching of thse nodes. In this paper we present an out-of-core visualization algorithm that overcomes this problem by filling the cracks generated by the simplification algorithm with appropriately shaded fat borders. Furthermore, several minor yet important improvements of previous approaches are made. This way we come up with a simple nevertheless efficient view-dependent rendering technique which allows for the natural incorporation of state-of-the-art culling, simplification, compression and prefetching techniques.