Efficient out-of-core rendering of complex 3D scenes

We propose a new method for efficient out-of-core rendering of complex 3D scenes. The method consists of two main phases: a new out-of-core preprocessing and a run-time, view-dependent rendering of the scene. In the preprocessing, we partition the scene with a spatial octree and build an on-disk multi-resolution hierarchical representation for the scene. Then at run-time, the multi-threaded technology is used. The prefetching thread predicts the motion of the viewer and prefetches the scene that would be seen next. The rendering thread traverses the octree hierarchy and renders the scene by view-dependent selective refinement. Experimental results show that our system can render large complex 3D scenes of tens of millions of triangles at interactive rates on commodity PC with fine image quality and minimal popping artifacts.