Rendering of large and complex urban environments for real time heritage reconstructions

In this paper we describe a rendering package, which brings together a number of rendering techniques and optimisations to render large and complex urban environments at interactive frame rates. The package has been built on top of a proprietary Scene Graph structure developed for the CHARISMATIC project. The paper presents an integrated approach combining Real-time Optionally Adapting Meshes, View Frustum Culling, Occluder Shadows, Level of Detail for Houses and Motion Captured Avatars in a single application.We discuss the performance issues associated with our approaches and give comprehensive implementation details. We also consider implications of the trends in high performance graphics sub-systems for PCs in the context of data types and animations required for populated interactive virtual heritage experiences. Finally we present empirical results to demonstrate the importance of employing such techniques and the implications for practical virtual heritage applications.