Game Rendering » Scene Management

Uniform Grid

admin — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 20:54:56 +0000

This is maybe the easiest way to manage the objects in a scene and is also often a very good choice. It’s a simple uniform grid with equally sized cells/buckets/patches (or whatever you want to call it). When rendering, all that is needed for culling is to check the view frustum against these cells to determine which ones are visible. This grid can most of the time be in only 2D but can of course in special cases be 3D if necessary. This spatial data structure works well with both static and dynamic objects.

Some information of traversing a grid structure

http://www.cse.yorku.ca/~amana/research/grid.pdf

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Scene Graph

admin — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 22:14:50 +0000

A scene graph is a tree structure that tries to structure the objects in a scene accordingly to transformations, textures, materials and much more instead of just the geometrical representation of objects like for example a quadtree does. All games does contain a scene graph in some way, in the most simple form it could just be a root node and all other rendered objects as child nodes to the root node.

Here’s a list of useful links concerning scene graphs. Most links are borrowed from a post on gamedev.net but copied to this post so that I could remove broken links and include new ones.

Scene Graph Basics

Scene Graph design/implementation issues/notes etc

SG State Sorting

Shader/Material System/Integration

Optimizations for scene graphs

Spatialization

Most of this list was copied from the following gamedev.net forum thread.
http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=349829

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Quadtree

admin — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 23:05:11 +0000

Nearly the same as a Octree but instead of dividing the space in cuboids in 3D it’s rectangles in 2D space. This is useful for rendering terrain and you want to cull a lot of the terrain fast.

A visual demonstration of a quadtree used for fast collision detection:
http://lab.polygonal.de/2007/09/09/quadtree-demonstration/

Introduction to quadtrees and sample code:
http://www.gamedev.net/reference/programming/features/quadtrees/

More info about quadtrees, including source:
http://www.kyleschouviller.com/wsuxna/quadtree-source-included/

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Octree

admin — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 12:28:27 +0000

Octrees are one of many ways to divide the space into smaller volumes structured in a tree. This is useful for culling objects while rendering or for finding collisions between objects. First cover the entire space that is of important into one big cuboid. Then the dividing algorithm for the tree goes as follows:

- First select the maximum number of objects in each cuboid. This determines how deep the tree will go.

- For each cuboid that contains more objects than the maximum allowed, split it into eight (oct = eight) new cuboids with the same volume and dimensions. Repeat this step until all cuboids fulfill the requirement.

The procedure looks like the following:

More information about octrees.
http://www.gamasutra.com/features/19970801/octree.htm

Source of the image:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octree

A little description of octrees.
http://www.flipcode.com/archives/Introduction_To_Octrees.shtml

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