[gameprogrammer] Re: Level of detail rendering

Alan,
  As you've probably guessed, this technique is not new, it's been referred
to as 'imposters' - a google search for something like imposters and rendering
will get you various papers on the subject :) Not sure who was the first to
use it.

As you've guessed, for objects suitably far away, you can get away with 
updating them fairly infrequently (also remember, that even updating it 
once a second at 60fps cut's the amount of rendering of them by 60 (minus 
all the copying to texture/billboarding overhead). From memory, MS Flight 
Sim used them for clouds, and had the fairly unorthodox technique of using 
a software renderer, rendering the clouds->textures entirely using spare 
CPU cycles.

Leighton...

On Fri, Mar 31, 2006 at 10:08:40AM -0800, Alan Wolfe wrote:
> Hey everyone,
>  
> I find alot of ideas you come up with tend to already be done or have tried 
> and
> failed for some reason :P
>  
> but, I had an idea for LOD i thought i'd kick around see what you guys 
> thought.
> 
> W/ LOD, distant objects don't need much detail, but what i was thinking is 
> that
> they are also pretty static when you get really far away.
>  
> So static for instance, that a really distant mountain is often just a skybox
> :P
>  
> so, my idea was this, what if when an object got really far away, It rendered
> the object to a surface and just displayed it as a quad until it either needed
> ot start rendering it as a 3d model again, or until it needed to update the
> quad due to the player viewing it from a different angle.
>  
> I know with changing lighting and other things it would make this technique 
> not
> work so well, but if we're talking about an outdoors scene where the global
> lighting changes slowly, maybe it would work out good.
>  
> What do you guys think?  Has this been tried before?

-- 

#0421 113 305 - dayta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
"Linux is legacy, but it will be a start." Ken Kutaragi - SCE



---------------------
To unsubscribe go to http://gameprogrammer.com/mailinglist.html

Other related posts: