Dynamic Scene Occlusion Culling

Large, complex 3D scenes are best rendered in an output-sensitive way, i.e., in time largely independent of the entire scene model’s complexity. Occlusion culling is one of the key techniques for output-sensitive rendering. We generalize existing occlusion culling algorithms, intended for static scenes, to handle dynamic scenes having numerous moving objects. The data structure used by an occlusion culling method is updated to reflect the objects’ possible positions. To avoid updating the structure for every dynamic object at each frame, a temporal bounding volume (TBV) is created for each occluded dynamic object, using some known constraints on the object’s motion. The TBV is inserted into the structure instead of the object. Subsequently, the object is ignored as long as the TBV is occluded and guaranteed to contain the object. The generalized algorithms’ rendering time is linearly affected only by the scene’s visible parts, not by hidden parts or by occluded dynamic objects. Our techniques also save communications in distributed graphic systems, e.g., multiuser virtual environments, by eliminating update messages for hidden dynamic objects. We demonstrate the adaptation of two occlusion culling algorithms to dynamic scenes: hierarchical Z-buffering and BSP tree projection.