language: en

Hierarchical Image Caching for Accelerated Walkthroughs of Complex Environments

Jonathan Shade Dani Lischinski David H. Salesin Tony DeRose John Snyder
Department of Computer Science and Engineering University of Washington
Microsoft Research
Technical Report UW-CSE-96-01-06 January 1996

Abstract We present a new method for accelerating walkthroughs of geometrically complex static scenes. As a preprocessing step, our method constructs a BSP-tree that hierarchically partitions the geometric primitives in the scene. In the course of a walkthrough, images of nodes at various levels of the hierarchy are cached for reuse in subsequent frames. A cached image is applied as a texture map to a single quadrilateral that is drawn instead of the geometry contained in the corresponding node. Visual artifacts are kept under control by using an error metric that quantifies the discrepancy between the appearance of the geometry contained in a node and the cached image. The new method is shown to achieve significant speedups for a walkthrough of a complex outdoor scene, with little or no loss in rendering quality.