Computing the Approximate Visibility Map, with Applications to Form Factors and Discontinuity Meshing

摘要

This paper describes a robust, hardware-accelerated algorithm to compute an approximate visibility map, which describes the visible scene from a particular viewpoint. The user can control the degree of approximation, choosing more accuracy at the cost of increased execution time. The algorithm exploits item buffer hardware to coarsely determine visibility, which is later refined. The paper also describes a conceptually simple algorithm to compute a subset of the discontinuity mesh using the visibility map.