Hierarchical dynamic simplification (HDS) is a new approach to the problem of simplifying arbitrary polygonal environments. HDS operates dynamically, retessellating the scene continuously as the user’s viewing position shifts, and adaptively, processing the entire database without first decomposing the environment into individual objects. The resulting system allows real-time display of very complex polygonal CAD models consisting of thousands of parts and hundreds of thousands of polygons. HDS supports various preprocessing algorithms and various run-time criteria, providing a general framework for dynamic viewdependent simplification. Briefly, HDS works by clustering vertices together in a hierarchical fashion. The simplification process continuously queries this hierarchy to generate a scene containing only those polygons that are important from the current viewpoint. When the volume of space associated with a vertex cluster occupies less than a user-specified amount of the screen, all vertices within that cluster are collapsed together and degenerate polygons filtered out. HDS maintains an active list of visible polygons for rendering. Since frame-to-frame movements typically involve small changes in viewpoint, and therefore modify the active list by only a few polygons, the method takes advantage of temporal coherence for greater speed.

This paper presents a method for approximating polyhedral objects to support a timecritical collision-detection algorithm. The approximations are hierarchies of spheres, and they allow the time-critical algorithm to progressively refine the accuracy of its detection, stopping as needed to maintain the real-time performance essential for interactive applications. The key to this approach is a preprocess that automatically builds tightly fitting hierarchies for rigid and articulated objects. The preprocess uses medial-axis surfaces, which are skeletal representations of objects. These skeletons guide an optimization technique that gives the hierarchies accuracy properties appropriate for collision detection. In a sample application, hierarchies built this way allow the time-critical collision-detection algorithm to have acceptable accuracy, improving significantly on that possible with hierarchies built by previous techniques. The performance of the time-critical algorithm in this appli...

Solid objects in the real world do not pass through each other when they collide. Enforcing this property of "solidness" is important in many interactive graphics applications; for example, solidness makes virtual reality more believable, and solidness is essential for the correctness of vehicle simulators. These applications use a collision-detection algorithm to enforce the solidness of objects. Unfortunately, previous collision-detection algorithms do not adequately address the needs of interactive applications. To work in these applications, a collision-detection algorithm must run at real-time rates, even when many objects can collide, and it must tolerate objects whose motion is specified "on the fly" by a user. This dissertation describes a new collision-detection algorithm that meets these criteria through approximation and graceful degradation, elements of time-critical computing. The algorithm is not only fast but also interruptible, allowing an application to trade accuracy ...

We present a new method that utilizes path coherence to accelerate walkthroughs of geometrically complex static scenes. As a preprocessing step, our method constructs a BSP-tree that hierarchically partitions the geometric primitives in the scene. In the course of a walkthrough, images of nodes at various levels of the hierarchy are cached for reuse in subsequent frames. A cached image is reused by texture-mapping it onto a single quadrilateral that is drawn instead of the geometry contained in the corresponding node. Visual artifacts are kept under control by using an error metric that quantifies the discrepancy between the appearance of the geometry contained in a node and the cached image. The new method is shown to achieve speedups of an order of magnitude for walkthroughs of a complex outdoor scene, with little or no loss in rendering quality. CR Categories and Subject Descriptors: I.3.3 [Computer Graphics ]: Picture/Image Generation --- Display algorithms; I.3.7 [Computer Graphi...

We present a new algorithm for appearance-preserving simplification. Not only does it generate a low-polygon-count approximation of a model, but it also preserves the appearance. This is accomplished for a particular display resolution in the sense that we properly sample the surface position, curvature, and color attributes of the input surface. We convert the input surface to a representation that decouples the sampling of these three attributes, storing the colors and normals in texture and normal maps, respectively. Our simplification algorithm employs a new texture deviation metric, which guarantees that these maps shift by no more than a user-specified number of pixels on the screen. The simplification process filters the surface position, while the runtime system filters the colors and normals on a per-pixel basis. We have applied our simplification technique to several large models achieving significant amounts of simplification with little or no loss in rendering quality.

Efficiently identifying polygons that are visible from a dynamic synthetic viewpoint is an important problem in computer graphics. Typically, visibility determination is performed using the z-buffer algorithm. As this algorithm must examine every triangle in the input scene, z-buffering can consume a significant fraction of graphics processing, especially on architectures that have a low performance or software z-buffer. One way to avoid needlessly processing invisible portions of the scene is to use an occlusion culling algorithm to discard invisible polygons early in the graphics pipeline. In this paper, we exploit the presence of large occluders in urban and architectural models to design a real-time occlusion culling algorithm. Our algorithm has the following features: it is conservative, i.e., it overestimates the set of visible polygons; it exploits spatial coherence by using a hierarchical data structure; and it exploits temporal coherence by reusing visibility information computed for previous viewpoints. The new algorithm significantly accelerates rendering of several complex test models.

We present an algorithm for performing adaptive real-time level-of-detail-based rendering for triangulated polygonal models. The simplifications are dependent on viewing direction, lighting, and visibility and are performed by taking advantage of image-space, object-space, and frame-to-frame coherences. In contrast to the traditional approaches of precomputing a fixed number of level-of-detail representations for a given object our approach involves statically generating a continuous level-ofdetail representation for the object. This representation is then used at run-time to guide the selection of appropriate triangles for display. The list of displayed triangles is updated incrementally from one frame to the next. Our approach is more effective than the current level-of-detail-based rendering approaches for most scientific visualization applications where there are a limited number of highly complex objects that stay relatively close to the viewer. Our approach is applicable for scalar (such as distance from the viewer) as well as vector (such as normal direction) attributes.

Despite recent advances in rendering hardware, large and complex virtual environments cannot be displayed with a sufficiently high frame rate, because of limitations in the available rendering performance. This paper presents a new approach of software accelerated rendering which draws from the concepts of impostors, hierarchical scene subdivision and levels of detail. So far software optimization in real-time rendering has merely considered individual objects. This work is actually optimizing the rendering of the whole virtual environment by implementing a three dimensional image cache. It speeds up rendering for large portions of the scene by exploiting the coherence inherent in any smooth frame sequence. The implementation of the three dimensional image cache is discussed and the savings in rendering load achievable on a suitable hardware platform are presented. Keywords: viewing algorithms, geometric algorithms, object hierarchies, virtual reality. 1 Introduction The basic capab...

Urban environments present unique challenges to interactive visualization systems, because of the huge complexity of the geometrical data and the widely varying visibility conditions. This paper introduces a new framework for real-time visualisation of such urban scenes. The central concept is that of a dynamic segmentation of the dataset, into a local three-dimensional model and a set of impostors used to represent distant scenery. A segmentation model is presented, based on inherent urban structure. A new impostor structure is introduced, derived from the level-of-detail approach. Impostors combine three-dimensional geometry to correctly model large depth discontinuities and parallax, and textures to rapidly display visual detail. We present the algorithms necessary for the creation of accurate and efficient three-dimensional impostors. The implementation of our algorithms allows interactive navigation in complex urban databases, as required by many applications.

This thesis presents a volumetric representation for the global illumination within a space based on the radiometric quantity irradiance. We call this representation the irradiance volume. Although irradiance is traditionally computed only for surfaces, its de nition can be naturally extended to all points and directions in space. The irradiance volume supports the reconstruction of believable approximations to the illumination in situations that overwhelm traditional global illumination algorithms. Atheoretical basis for the irradiance volume is discussed and the methods and issues involved with building the volume are described. The irradiance volume method is tested within several situations in which the use of traditional global illumination methods is impractical, and is shown to provide good performance.