Real-Time Appearance Preserving Out-of-Core Rendering with Shadows
Abstract
Despite recent advances in finding efficient LOD-representations for gigantic 3D objects, rendering of complex, gigabyte-sized models and environments is still a challenging task, especially under real-time constraints and high demands on the visual accuracy. The two general approaches are using either a polygon- or a point-based representation for the simplified geometry. With the polygon-based approaches high frame rates can be achieved by sacrificing the exact appearance and thus the image quality. Point-based approaches on the other hand preserve higher image quality at the cost of higher primitive counts and therefore lower frame rates.
In this paper we present a new hybrid point-polygon LOD algorithm for real-time rendering of complex models and environments including shadows. While rendering different LODs, we preserve the appearance of an object by using a novel error measure for simplification which allows us to steer the LOD generation in such a way that the geometric as well as the appearance deviation is bounded in image space. Additionally, to enhance the perception of the models shadows should be used. We present a novel LOD selection and prefetching method for real-time rendering of hard shadows. In contrast to the only currently available method for out-of-core shadow generation, our approach entirely runs on a single CPU system.
Keywords: large model visualization, out-of-core algorithms
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Bibtex
@INCOLLECTION{guthe-2004-real-time, author = {Guthe, Michael and Borodin, Pavel and Bal{\'a}zs, {\'A}kos and Klein, Reinhard}, editor = {Keller, A. and Jensen, H. W.}, pages = {69--79 + 409}, title = {Real-Time Appearance Preserving Out-of-Core Rendering with Shadows}, booktitle = {Rendering Techniques 2004 (Proceedings of Eurographics Symposium on Rendering)}, year = {2004}, month = jun, publisher = {Eurographics Association}, keywords = {large model visualization, out-of-core algorithms}, abstract = {Despite recent advances in finding efficient LOD-representations for gigantic 3D objects, rendering of complex, gigabyte-sized models and environments is still a challenging task, especially under real-time constraints and high demands on the visual accuracy. The two general approaches are using either a polygon- or a point-based representation for the simplified geometry. With the polygon-based approaches high frame rates can be achieved by sacrificing the exact appearance and thus the image quality. Point-based approaches on the other hand preserve higher image quality at the cost of higher primitive counts and therefore lower frame rates. In this paper we present a new hybrid point-polygon LOD algorithm for real-time rendering of complex models and environments including shadows. While rendering different LODs, we preserve the appearance of an object by using a novel error measure for simplification which allows us to steer the LOD generation in such a way that the geometric as well as the appearance deviation is bounded in image space. Additionally, to enhance the perception of the models shadows should be used. We present a novel LOD selection and prefetching method for real-time rendering of hard shadows. In contrast to the only currently available method for out-of-core shadow generation, our approach entirely runs on a single CPU system.}, issn = {1727-3463}, isbn = {3-905673-12-6}, conference = {Eurographics Symposium on Rendering 2004 (EGSR 2004)} }