Method for out-of core rendering of large 3D models

摘要

The present invention is a method and system for interactive rendering of large polygonal environments on commodity PC hardware. The system allows a user to walk through a large model at interactive frame rates on machines with limited memory. It works by first creating a hierarchical spatial decomposition of the model on disk using a fast and incremental out-of-core preprocessing algorithm. At running time, the system and method uses an approximate from-point visibility algorithm to dynamically determine which parts of the model to retrieve from disk. Multiple threads and a speculative prefetching algorithm are used to improve frame rates.