Interactive Editing Oriented Massive-Model Real-time Rendering System

Interactive visualization and exploration of massive 3D models is a crucial component of many scientific and engineering disciplines and is becoming increasingly important for simulations, education, and entertainment applications. In all those fields, we're observing a data explosion: information quantity is exponentially increasing. Despite the continuing increase in computing and graphics processing power, the graphics community realizes that relying solely on hardware developments to cope with any data size in the foreseeable future isn't enough. While increased computing power is letting users produce more and more complex data sets, memory bandwidth is growing at a significantly slower rate than processing power, becoming the major bottleneck when dealing with massive data sets. To overcome this limitation, researchers have proposed a wide variety of output-sensitive rendering algorithms—that is, rendering techniques whose runtime and memory footprint is proportional to the number of image pixels, rather than to the total model complexity. In addition to requiring out-of-core data management for handling data sets larger than main memory or for enabling applications to explore data stored on remote servers, these methods require the integration of techniques for filtering out as efficiently as possible the data that isn't contributing to a particular image.In the article, we present an approach of the design and implementation of an interactive editing oriented massive-model real-time rendering system, which is intended not only for the real-time rendering of static massive models, but also for interactive editing operations through human interface devices. The System integrates many output-sensitive algorithms including geometric simplification, level-of-detail, occlusion culling; and many data management methods such as out-of-core techniques, cache-oblivious layout and compression methods to tackle various bottleneck and performance problems. In addition, we introduce a distributed simplification system to provide on-line simplification power, enabling real-time rendering after interactive editing. In particular, the System allows for demands of parallel rendering from the outset, and can be easily ported to a parallel rendering system without any modification.