Interactive visualization of complex dynamic virtual environments for industrial assemblies

Interactive visualization of assemblies in a virtual environment is important to the industrial applications like design verification and maintenance processes training. In general, the difficulty and the complication of the interactive visualization of industrial assemblies arise from the facts that an assembly model generally has a large number of primitives and high depth complexity; furthermore, dynamic environments are required for simulating assembly manipulations. In this paper, a dynamic data model for visualization of industrial assemblies is proposed. The data model integrates a spatial data set of hierarchical model representation and a dynamic transformation mechanism for runtime adaptation to the changes and movements of the assembly structures. Based on the dynamic spatial database, a visibility optimization approach that can efficiently reduce the overall geometry is presented. The complexity reduction is accomplished through view frustum culling, non-conservative occlusion culling, and geometry simplification. By which, significant speedup in user interaction rates has been achieved. Since all the techniques developed here are supported by mainstream graphics hardware, thus the solution is able to provide users with practical real-time visualization of complex dynamic virtual assembly environments with affordable graphics hardware. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All fights reserved.