Integrating Occlusion Culling into LOD on GPU

Abstract

Real-time rendering of complex 3D models is still a very challenging task. Recently, GPU-based level-of-detail (LOD) approaches have been proposed to fast decrease the complexity of a 3D model, but applying only LOD approaches is usually not sufficient to achieve highly interactive rendering rate for the complex model that contains hundreds of millions of triangles. Visibility culling, especially occlusion culling, needs to be introduced to further reduce the amount of triangles being rendered at each frame. In this paper, we present a novel rendering approach that seamlessly integrates occlusion culling with the LOD approach in a unified scheme towards the GPU architecture. The result shows that the integration significantly reduces the complexity of the 3D model and satisfies the demands of both memory efficiency and performance.