Level-of-detail occlusion culling is a novel approach to the management of occluders that can be easily integrated into most current visibility culling algorithms. The main contribution of this paper is an algorithm that automatically generates sets of densely overlapping boxes with enhanced occlusion properties from non-convex subsets. We call this method occluder synthesis because it is not sensitive to the way the objects are tesselated but to the space enclosed by them. The extension of this technique by allowing a bounded amount of image error is also discussed. We show that visibility computations can be based on a multiresolution model which provides several representations of these occluders with varying visibility accuracy. Our tests show that occlusion performance in tesselated scenes is improved severely even if no imageerror is allowed.
Most visibility culling algorithms require convexity of occluders. Occluder synthesis algorithms attempt to construct large convex occluders inside bulky non-convex sets. Occluder fusion algorithms generate convex occluders that are contained in the umbra cast by a group of objects given an area light. In this paper we prove that convexity requirements can be shifted from the occluders to their umbra with no loss of efficiency, and use this property to show how some special non-planar, non-convex closed polylines that we call "hoops" can be used to compute occlusion efficiently for objects that have no large interior convex sets and were thus rejected by previous approaches.
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