Paper
Gokul Varadhan, Dinesh Manocha, "Out-of-Core Rendering
of Massive Geometric Environments", To appear in IEEE Visualization 2002
Abstract
We present an external memory algorithm for fast display of very large
and complex geometric environments. We represent the model using a scene
graph
and employ different culling techniques for rendering acceleration.
Our algorithm uses a parallel approach to render the scene as well as fetch
objects from the disk in a synchronous manner. We present a novel prioritized
prefetching technique that takes into account LOD-switching and visibility-based
events between successive frames. We have applied our algorithm to large
gigabyte sized environments that are composed of thousands of objects and
tens of millions of polygons. The memory overhead of our algorithm is output
sensitive and is typically tens of megabytes. In practice, our approach
scales with the model sizes, and its rendering performance is comparable
to that of an in-core algorithm.