Computer Graphics Through OpenGL, 2nd Edition

Chapter 6

Advanced Animation Techniques

The goal for this chapter is to learn techniques to cope with two issues that arise often in animation projects. The first is managing large worlds where the polygon count may painfully slow down the rendering pipeline. The programmer can help ease the logjam by prefiltering objects lying outside the camera’s field of view. This process is called frustum culling and we describe how to do it by means of space partitioning in Section 6.1. The related process of occlusion culling, where objects blocked from the camera’s view by other objects are filtered, is the topic of Section 6.2. This section discusses, as well, occlusion queries and conditional rendering.

The second issue is that of animating the orientation ...