Exploiting partial visibility in the real-time display of virtual natural environments

With the increasing popularity of virtual environment applications there has been much research into algorithms to efficiently display polygonal databases. Most research has been devoted to developing rendering algorithms for the efficient display of databases containing many large geometric structures, such as those describing indoor and urban environments. However, relatively little work has been devoted to the efficient display of databases containing many small geometric structures (such as those describing natural environments). In this paper, we describe the problems with the current rendering algorithms when rendering complex scenes made of many small rendering primitives, and identify an approach that addresses these problems.