METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR PROVIDING SIMPLE GENERALIZED CONSERVATIVE VISIBILITY

Occluder nodes, which are planes with given width and height in object space that block the rendering of objects behind them in world space, are used to compute a conservative set of visible objects from a current viewpoint. Occluder nodes can be incorporated by scene designers and authoring tools to perform many high performance rendering techniques, including culling geometry in densely occluded models, region based scene division, and using images to represent far distant geometry. Using this simple primitive, generalized scene viewers are provided that allow interactive rendering of complex worlds, including multi-user environments, architectural models, three dimensional games, and large engineering models.