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Real-Time Occlusion Culling with a Lazy Occlusion Grid

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Rendering Techniques 2001 (EGSR 2001)

Part of the book series: Eurographics ((EUROGRAPH))

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Abstract

We present a new conservative image-space occlusion culling method to increase the rendering speed of very large general scenes on today’s available hardware without time-expensive preprocessing. The method is based on a low-resolution grid upon a conventional z-buffer. The occlusion information in the grid is updated in a lazy manner. In comparison to related methods this significantly reduces the number of pixels that have to be read from the z-buffer. The grid allows fast decisions if an object is occluded or potentially visible. It is used together with a bounding volume hierarchy that is traversed in a front-to-back order and which allows to cull large parts of the scene at once. A special front-to-back traversal is used if no pixel-level query for the furthest z-value of an image area is available. We show that the method works efficiently on today’s available hardware and we compare it with related methods.

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© 2001 Springer-Verlag Wien

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Hey, H., Tobler, R.F., Purgathofer, W. (2001). Real-Time Occlusion Culling with a Lazy Occlusion Grid. In: Gortler, S.J., Myszkowski, K. (eds) Rendering Techniques 2001. EGSR 2001. Eurographics. Springer, Vienna. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-7091-6242-2_20

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-7091-6242-2_20

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Vienna

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-211-83709-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-7091-6242-2

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