
Chapter
7
Level of Detail
T
he rendering of a detailed and complex model that consists of thousands of
triangles looks quite good when the model is near the eye point. The time it
takes to render the large number of triangles is well worth the gain in visual quality.
However, when the same model is far from the eye point, the detail provided by
thousands of triangles is not that noticeable, because the screen-space coverage of
the rendered model might be only a handful of pixels. In this situation, the trade-
off in time versus visual quality is not worth it. If the final rendering covers only a
handful of pixels, the number of triangles processed should ...