Architectural walkthroughs using portal textures
Daniel G. Aliaga, Anselmo Lastra · 1997
This paper outlines a method to dynamically replace portals with textures in a cell-partitioned model. The rendering complexity is reduced to the geometry of the current cell thus increasing interactive performance. A portal is a generalization of windows and doors. It connects two adjacent cells (or rooms). Each portal of the current cell that is some distance away from the viewpoint is rendered as a texture. The portal texture (smoothly) returns to geometry when the viewpoint gets close to the portal. This way all portal sequences (not too close to the viewpoint) have a depth complexity of one. The size of each texture and distance at which the transition occurs is configurable for each portal. Keywords: visibility culling, cells, portals, textures, sample points, morphing. 1. Introduction The visualization of architectural spaces (buildings, ships or similar structures) requires large complex models with many geometric primitives. This type of model, however, has a property that ...