Maintenance de la visibilité d'un point mobile, et applications

The notion of visibility is central in computer graphics and computational geometry. A visibility computation amounts to determining the shape, or merely the existence of the set of segments in space linking two specified objects without crossing any other. We examine the problem of maintaining the visibility of a moving viewpoint with the aid of a complex describing all the visibility relationships in a scene, at once: the visibility complex. We take two different approaches to this problem. In one, we show how one can maintain the so-called visibility polyhedron of the moving point, in an exact fashion. We apply a variant of the algorithm to the construction of the visibility complex of a set of disjoint polytopes. The second approach is motivated by the need to render complex 3D scenes at interactive rates. We propose an algorithm that decomposes a 3D scene into simple cells related together with simple visibility relationships represented as a graph. The scene is drawn as the graph is traversed, allowing pruning to speed up rendering. We also provide an efficient algorithm for real-time rendering of hard shadows