Hierarchical Levels of Detail for Fast Display of Large Static and Dynamic
Environments
TR00-012
Carl Erikson (eriksonc@cs.unc.edu), Dinesh Manocha (dm@cs.unc.edu)

We present a new approach for fast display of large static and dynamic
environments.  Given a geometric dataset, we represent it using a scene graph
and automatically compute levels of detail (LODs) for each node in the graph.
For drastic simplification, i.e., reducing the polygon count by an order of
magnitude or more, we compute hierarchical levels of detail (HLODs) that
represent portions of the scene graph.  When objects move in a dynamic
environment, we incrementally recompute a subset of the HLODs on the fly. Our
approach can efficiently handle scenes with a limited amount of dynamic
changes.  Furthermore, it supports two rendering modes: one that renders at a
specified image quality and another that targets a desired frame rate.  We
efficiently render LODs and HLODs using display lists and achieve significant
speedups on rendering large static and dynamic environments composed of tens of
millions of polygons.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Department of Computer Science
CB#3175, Sitterson Hall
Chapel Hill, NC  27599-3175