surface determination
hidden surface removal
occlusion culling
visible surface determination

Data structures, hidden surface removal, colour shading techniques, and some additional topics will be covered.

Hidden surface removal, z-sorting, and auto-clipping remain in this release as well.

It is relatively straightforward to calculate the circles of intersection, but more complex to represent a model with hidden surface removal.

Also contained is a widget library that can do 3D grey shaded rendering of surfaces with hidden surface removal.

In early displays only vectors could be drawn e.g. (Fig. 7) which are easy to draw because no rendering or hidden surface removal is required.

Hidden surface removal identifies surfaces that are not visible in the final scene and discards them before the scene is textured, lit and shaded.

A typical direct illumination renderer already contains nearly all of the algorithms (perspective transformations, texture mapping, hidden surface removal) required to implement radiosity.

Newell's Algorithm is a 3D computer graphics procedure for elimination of polygon cycles in the depth sorting required in hidden surface removal.

Hidden Surface Removal Algorithms: Depth-sort, z-buffer, back face culling and BSP trees.

Output-sensitive algorithms arise frequently in computational geometry applications and have been described for problems such as hidden surface removal and resolving range filter conflicts in router tables.

Although not a hidden surface removal algorithm as such, it implicitly solves the hidden surface removal problem by finding the nearest surface along each view-ray.

In the depth sorting phase of hidden surface removal, if two polygons have no overlapping extents or extreme minimum and maximum values in the x, y, and z directions, then they can be easily sorted.

However, their method, coined zone rendering, does not perform full hidden surface removal (HSR) and deferred texturing, therefore wasting fillrate and texture bandwidth on pixels that are not visible in the final image.

The list of geometry can also be sorted front to back, allowing the GPU to use hidden surface removal to avoid processing pixels that are hidden behind others, saving on memory bandwidth for unnecessary texture lookups.

At one point in time, CG students would typically build a rendering engine from scratch over a term, and would learn about incremental line drawing, antialiasing, polygon filling, polygon clipping, hidden surface removal, etc., first hand.

The PowerVR chipset uses a method of 3D rendering known as tile-based deferred rendering (often abbreviated as TBDR) which is tile-based rendering combined with PowerVR's proprietary method of Hidden Surface Removal.

There are several types of occlusion culling approaches:

Batman uses licensed visibility software, Umbra 3, to handle the occlusion culling in its game.

This enables rapid occlusion culling, which prevents objects from being rendered if it is not visible or too far to be visible.

Umbra provides the occlusion culling system for Unity game engine since Unity 3 release.

Prior Unity 5's release Umbra's occlusion culling solution was available only with paid Pro licenses.

Occlusion culling is performed on the GPU to remove the need for binary space partitioning or portal zones.

This new card was to be a high-end DirectX 9 part, offering new features such as occlusion culling, improved rendering performance and various other innovations.

ZBuffer hardware may typically include a coarse 'hi-Z' against which primitives can be rejected early without rasterization, this is a form of occlusion culling.

Umbra is GPU-accelerated occlusion culling software developed by Umbra software Ltd.

In March 2010, Unity Technologies announced that the next release of Unity would feature built-in occlusion culling preprocessing powered by Umbra.

CD Projekt RED has integrated the Umbra 3 Visibility Solution into its engine to handle occlusion culling.

Another similar technique is Z-culling, also known as occlusion culling, which attempts to skip the drawing of polygons which are covered from the viewpoint by other visible polygons.

R200 has advanced memory bandwidth saving and overdraw reduction hardware called HyperZ II that consists of occlusion culling (hierarchical Z), fast z-buffer clear, and z-buffer compression.

The latter is based on Umbra's Stereo Camera feature which the company explains allows "both eyes can use the results of a single occlusion culling operation - effectively halving the required processing time."

This is a form of occlusion culling, whereby a candidate set of potentially visible polygons are pre-computed, then indexed at run-time in order to quickly obtain an estimate of the visible geometry.

SOE is using the Umbra 3 Visibility Solution middleware to handle occlusion culling in PlanetSide 2 as part of the OMFG update announced 13 September 2013.

Hansong Zhang's dissertation "Effective Occlusion Culling for the Interactive Display of Arbitrary Models" [1] describes an occlusion culling approach.

While HPL 1 used a portal system to do occlusion culling (a process which determines what objects should not be drawn), HPL 2 uses a dynamic culling system technique called Coherent Hierarchical Culling.

The game also utilized Umbra Software's rendering tool, Umbra 3, as a way to speed up the rendering process of large environments by an optimization known as occlusion culling - a method of filtering out hidden objects so they are not rendered.

Umbra specializes in occlusion culling, visibility solution technology and provides middleware for video games running on Windows, Linux, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, handheld consoles, iOS, Wii U and other platforms.

However, it can be used in 3D through visible surface determination and with improved efficiency through Z-ordering.

This was the first demonstration of real-time visible surface determination using BSP trees.

BSP trees as a dimension independent spatial search structure was emphasized, with applications to visible surface determination.

The software uses acceleration techniques such as scanline for primary visible surface determination and binary space partitioning for secondary rays.

While binary space partitioning provides a convenient way to store and retrieve spatial information about polygons in a scene, it does not solve the problem of visible surface determination.

A related area to Visible Surface Determination (VSD) is culling, which usually happens before VSD in a rendering pipeline.