On incremental rendering of silhouette maps of a polyhedral scene

We consider the problem of incrementally rendering a polyhedral scene while the viewpoint is moving. In practical situations the number of geometric primitives to be rendered can be very large — hundreds of thousands or millions, but these may come from only a moderate number of objects that happen to have been finely tessellated. It is sometimes advantageous to render only the silhouettes of the objects, rather than the objects themselves, and then exploit coherence or other methods to optimize the rendering of single-object regions with uniform reflectance properties. Such an approach is also regularly used in the domain of non-photorealistic rendering, where the rendering of silhouette edges plays a key role. The hard part in efficiently implementing a kinetic approach to this problem is to realize when the rendered silhouette undergoes a combinatorial change. In this paper, we obtain bounds on a number of combinatorial problems involving the complexity of these events for a co...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2007
• Where: COMGEO
• Authors: Alon Efrat, Leonidas J. Guibas, Olaf A. Hall-Holt, Li Zhang
• Keywords: Applied Computing, COMGEO 2007, Polyhedral Scene, Silhouettes, Uniform Reflectance Properties