Campus Rendering Example Movies

Serial OpenGL rendering Note how the fixed-size ground texture is quite blurry up close, and the lack of shadows. The framerate is also terrible, due to the large amount of geometry in the trees.	Reference image (not generated in real time) Generated using the rendering techniques outlined in the thesis: penumbra limit shadows, and trapezoidal antialiased ground texture. Rendering was not real time--each frame took several seconds to generate.
Impostors with 9 processors Rendering recorded in real time. Note the framerate is much higher than serial OpenGL, because of the geometry reduction gained by impostors. Performance is limited by both the rendering rate and the impostor network shipping rate, which cause noticably lagged updates in each image.	Impostors with 65 processors Rendering recorded in real time. Performance is now limited almost exclusively by the network connection to the front end machine. Impostor updates are rarely lagged, and the differences between this and the reference movie are difficult to discern.

The flight path over the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign campus starts hovering over Springfield Avenue at the southwest corner of the Digital Computer Lab, moves north toward Beckman Institute, and then west toward Wright Street. This pure-translation camera path is the worst case for impostors; while pure camera rotation allows large amounts of impostor reuse. This camera path was used for the campus performance numbers given in the thesis.

Back to Thesis, Orion Lawlor, olawlor@acm.org, 12/21/2005