Interactive view-dependent rendering with conservative occlusion culling in complex environments

This paper presents an algorithm combining view-dependent rendering and conservative occlusion culling for interactive display of complex environments. A vertex hierarchy of the entire scene is decomposed into a cluster hierarchy through a novel clustering and partitioning algorithm. The cluster hierarchy is then used for view-frustum and occlusion culling. Using hardware accelerated occlusion queries and frame-to-frame coherence, a potentially visible set of clusters is computed. An active vertex front and face list is computed from the visible clusters and rendered using vertex arrays. The integrated algorithm has been implemented on a Pentium IV PC with a NVIDIA GeForce 4 graphics card and applied in two complex environments composed of millions of triangles. The resulting system can render these environments at interactive rates with little loss in image quality and minimal popping artifacts.