Continuous Level of Detail for Large Scale Rendering of 3D Animated Polygonal Models

Abstract

Current simulation applications are mainly focused on the efficient management of scenarios with static objects. However, managing dynamic objects, such as animated characters, is very different and requires more specific processing methods which tend to have a high computational cost. Recent advances in graphics hardware offer more ways to improve the performance of these scenes. In this paper, we introduce a new method for rendering large crowds of animated characters at interactive frame rates. Our method is a fully-GPU hybrid combination of mesh instancing, continuous level of detail and hardware palette skinning. Thus, we take advantage of mesh instancing to render multiple instances of a given mesh belonging to a continuous level of detail model, avoiding the typical popping artifacts existing on previous approaches. We finally obtained a low storage cost, performance improvements when applying level of detail and mesh instancing techniques and, moreover, a minimization of the overhead produced by animating.