PREPRINT — the final version can be found in The Visual Computer. Separating Semantics from Rendering: A Scene Graph based Architecture for Graphics Applications

Abstract A large number of rendering and graphics applications developed in research and industry are based on scene graphs. Traditionally scene graphs encapsulate the hierarchical structure of a complete 3D scene, and combine both semantic and rendering aspects. In this paper we propose a clean separation of the semantic and rendering parts of the scene graph. This leads to a generally applicable architecture for graphics appli-cations that is loosely based on the well known Model-View-Controller (MVC) design pattern for separating the user interface and computation parts of an applica-tion. We explore the benefits of this new design for var-ious rendering and modeling tasks, such as rendering dynamic scenes, out-of-core rendering of large scenes, generation of geometry for trees and vegetation, and multi-view rendering. Finally we show some of the im-plementation details that have been solved in the pro-cess of using this software architecture in a large frame-work for rapid development of visualization and render-ing applications. Keywords scene graph ¨ systems architecture ¨ semantics ¨ rendering ¨ design pattern