Stochastic Pruning

Robert L. Cook, John Halstead

Abstract:

Many renderers perform poorly on scenes that contain a lot of detailed geometry. Level-of-detail techniques can alleviate the load on the renderer by creating simplified representations of primitives that are small on the screen. Current methods work well when the detail is due to the complexity of the individual elements, but not when it is due to the large number of elements. In this paper, we introduce a technique for automatically simplifying this latter type of geometric complexity. Some elements are pruned (i.e., eliminated), and the remaining elements are altered to preserve the statistical properties of the scene.

Paper (PDF)

Additional materials: [Pruned.mov], [PrunedCloseup.mov], [Unpruned.mov]

Available as Pixar Technical Memo #06-05

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