Called hierarchical occlusions maps hom

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The amount of code needed to implement these great looking effects is minimal, keeping the overall elegance of the portal approach.

[ Team LiB ]

Hierarchical Occlusion Maps

You have seen how both BSP and portal implementations try to compute indoors environments by means of quickly computing the occlusion portion. Clipping and culling are usually added to the mix easily, but it's the occlusion part that causes most trouble. Let's now review another approach. Like portal rendering, this technique is designed to compute occlusions at runtime. The main advantage of this new technique, called hierarchical occlusions maps (HOM), is that no preprocessing is actually needed. Occlusions can be computed from geometry that comes directly from your modeling package of choice. Another advantage is that HOM can handle static and dynamic geometry seamlessly, making it a bit more powerful (but also more complex) than portal rendering.

Then, at runtime, we select the N closest occluders from the database. Remember that occluders need to be visible, so performing a clipping test as well will be worthwhile. We then build the HOM based on these objects. The high-resolution version is created with render-to-texture capabilities. To create the low-resolution copies, we can compute them on software, or even better, using lower resolution textures and bilinear minification filters. As we traverse our scene graph, we test visible nodes against the HOM. If they lie in a black zone, we need to paint them. If they are in a white zone, we perform the Z-test with the DEB and decide whether we should discard them or not based on the results. Objects in gray areas require further refining in the HOM before moving on to the DEB phase. In the end, a well-built HOM can cull away between 40 and 60 percent of all incoming geometry.

[ Team LiB ]