Reducing the effect of complexity on volume model evaluation

A major problem with volume modelling systems is that processing times may increase with model complexity in a worse than linear fashion. The authors have addressed this problem, for picture generation, by repeatedly dividing the space occupied by a model, and evaluating the sub-models created only when they meet a criterion of simplicity. Hidden surface elimination has been integrated with evaluation, in such a way that major portions of the model which are not visible are never evaluated. An example demonstrates a better than linear relationship between model complexity and computation time, and also shows the effect of picture complexity on the performance of the process.