Realtime Animation and Visualisation of Complex Scenes on Standard PCs (Abstract)

Today, interactive computer graphics has to deal with data sets of increasing complexity. This trend can be observed in many application areas: In scientific visualisation, the complexity of data sets has grown enormously due to improvements in sensor and simulation technology. In the area of computer aided design (CAD), three-dimensional virtual prototypes of complex projects should be visualized and edited interactively. The entertainment industry has to deal with complexity problems, too: Recent computer generated feature films like Final Fantasy already come close to photo-realistic simulations of reality, thus requiring highly detailed three-dimensional models. Special effects for feature films (for instance the large crowd animations in the recent Lord of the Rings trilogy) also depict highly complex scenes. Interactive entertainment applications, such as computer games, aim at a photo-realistic simulation of virtual worlds. Such interactive applications pose especially high demands on graphic algorithms: As the user is free to move interactively in a virtual world, a large amount of detail has to be modeled. Different scales, ranging from leaves of grass to complete mountains must be included to sustain a realistic impression of different view positions. This leads to scene data bases of huge complexity. Additionally, all computations must be handled in real-time. All these developments lead to the somehow paradox fact that handling of complexity is today still one of the major problems in computer graphics, despite of the enormous advances in graphics hardware and algorithms.