Fast Approximate Visible Set Determination for Point Sample Clouds

Abstract

We present a fast, efficient method to determine approximate visible sets for vegetation rendered as point sample clouds. A hardware accelerated preprocessing step is used to determine exact visibility for a selected set of views; at runtime the current view is rendered using an approximate visible set constructed from the three closest precalculated views. We will further demonstrate how this method leads to a significant per-frame reduction of the original data size.