Simplification Culling of Static and Dynamic Scene Graphs
TR98-009
Carl Erikson (eriksonc@cs.unc.edu), Dinesh Manocha (dm@cs.unc.edu)

We present a new approach for simplifying large polygonal environments composed
of hundreds or thousands of objects.  Our algorithm represents the environment
using a scene graph and automatically computes levels of detail (LOD) for each
node in the graph.  For drastic simplification, the algorithm uses
"hierarchical levels of detail" (HLOD) to represent the simplified geometry of
whole portions of the scene graph.  When HLOD are rendered, the algorithm can
ignore these portions, thereby performing "simplification culling."  For
dynamic environments, HLOD are incrementally computed on the fly.  The
algorithm is applicable to all models and involves no user intervention.  It
generates high quality and drastic simplifications and has been applied to CAD
models composed of hundreds of thousands of polygons.  In practice, it achieves
significant speedups in rendering large static and dynamic environments with
little loss in image quality.

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