Occluder Simplification Using Planar Sections

• Published in: Computer graphics forum Vol. 33; no. 1; pp. 235 - 245
• Main Authors: Silvennoinen, Ari, Saransaari, Hannu, Laine, Samuli, Lehtinen, Jaakko
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01.02.2014
• Subjects: geometry simplification; I.3.5 [Computer Graphics]: Computational Geometry and Object Modelling-Curve; object representations; occlusion; rendering; solid; surface; visibility
• ISSN: 0167-7055; 1467-8659
• DOI: 10.1111/cgf.12271

We present a method for extreme occluder simplification. We take a triangle soup as input, and produce a small set of polygons with closely matching occlusion properties. In contrast to methods that optimize the original geometry, our algorithm has very few requirements for the input— specifically, the input does not need to be a watertight, two‐manifold mesh. This robustness is achieved by working on a well‐behaved, discretized representation of the input instead of the original, potentially badly structured geometry. We first formulate the algorithm for individual occluders, and further introduce a hierarchy for handling large, complex scenes. We present a method for extreme occluder simplification. We take a triangle soup as input, and produce a small set of polygons with closely matching occlusion properties. In contrast to methods that optimize the original geometry, our algorithm has very few requirements for the input— specifically, the input does not need to be a watertight, two‐manifold mesh. This robustness is achieved by working on a well‐behaved, discretized representation of the input instead of the original, potentially badly structured geometry. We first formulate the algorithm for individual occluders, and further introduce a hierarchy for handling large, complex scenes.