New Approaches to Efficient Rendering of Complex Reconstructed Environments

The creation of complete reconstructions of populated urban environments are technically difficult tasks primarily due to economic constraints in the modeling phase: complex models need to keep rendering aspects in mind in order to warrant interactive rendering speeds which makes this kind of work a labor-intensive task for highly skilled personel. Specialized modelling tools, which exploit knowledge of the types of object being modelled by working in the application domain, can be used to create appealing virtual reconstructions quickly. At the same time, the structural information from the modeller gives essential hints to the interactive renderer to determine efficient interactive display strategies through the use of level-of-detail and culling techniques. Even more important, only a shift in the modeling paradigm from ’just in case’ to ’just in time’ can solve the problem applications are faced in real-time rendering. In this paper we discuss the way in which polygonal and multi-resolution surface techniques can complement one another in the effective rendering of complex reconstructed environments. We also draw more general conclusions which apply to other software systems that share the same objectives.