Trim Regions for Online Computation of From-Region Potentially Visible Sets

Abstract

Visibility computation is a key element in computer graphics applications. More specifically, a from-region potentially visible set (PVS) is an established tool in rendering acceleration, but its high computational cost means a from-region PVS is almost always precomputed. Precomputation restricts the use of PVS to static scenes and leads to high storage cost, in particular, if we need fine-grained regions. For dynamic applications, such as streaming content over a variable-bandwidth network, online PVS computation with configurable region size is required. We address this need with trim regions, a new method for generating from-region PVS for arbitrary scenes in real time. Trim regions perform controlled erosion of object silhouettes in image space, implicitly applying the shrinking theorem known from previous work. Our algorithm is the first that applies automatic shrinking to unconstrained 3D scenes, including non-manifold meshes, and does so in real time using an efficient GPU execution model. We demonstrate that our algorithm generates a tight PVS for complex scenes and outperforms previous online methods for from-viewpoint and from-region PVS. It runs at 60 Hz for realistic game scenes consisting of millions of triangles and computes PVS with a tightness matching or surpassing existing approaches.