View Frustum Culling Tutorial

Introduction

In order to visualize a scene from different angles a virtual camera is often used. The virtual camera setup, commonly done with gluPerspective and gluLookAt functions, determines what is visible on screen.

The view frustum is the volume that contains everything that is potentially (there may be occlusions) visible on the screen. This volume is defined according to the camera's settings, and when using a perspective projection takes the shape of a truncated pyramid.

The apex of the pyramid is the camera position and the base of the pyramid is the far plane. The pyramid is truncated at the near plane, hence the name frustum.

All the stuff that will potentially be visible on screen is inside, at least partially, the truncated pyramid, so there is no need to try and render what is outside the frustum, since it won't be visible anyway.

In the figure above all the green stuff (totally inside the view frustum) and all the yellow stuff (partially inside) would be rendered, whereas the red stuff will not be rendered. Note that the green sphere is not visible (it is occluded by the yellow ellipse), but it will be rendered anyway because it is inside the view frustum.

The goal of view frustum culling is therefore to be able to identify what is inside the frustum (totally or partially), and cull everything that is not inside. Only the stuff that is inside the frustum is sent to the graphics hardware. In the end, all that is asked of the graphics hardware is to render what is potentially visible, saving on the processing of all those vertices that are not visible anyway. Furthermore, this can potentially improve the performance of the application since only the vertices that are part of the visible part of the 3D world are kept on the graphics card memory, and these are more likely to fit than the whole 3D world.

This test makes sense if the part of the 3D world that is inside the frustum is significantly smaller than the world itself. But what does significantly smaller mean? That depends on the application. In the extreme case when the whole 3D world is always visible, view frustum culling is just a waste of time because there is nothing to cull. But since this culling technique is so easy to implement and the performance benefits can be very significant it is worth a try.

[Previous] [Next: View Frustum's Shape]

OpenGL	VRML	W3D

Home	Tutorials	Books	Applications	Tools	Docs	Models	Textures