Patent Document ID: 6130670
Application ID: 08902433

Base Claim:
1. A method for providing simple generalized conservative visibility, comprising the steps of: providing one or more occluder nodes, wherein said one or more occluder nodes are planes having a given width and height in object space that block the rendering of objects behind them in world space; providing an activationDistance field which specifies how far a camera must be from an occluder node for said occluder node to be active; using said one or more occluder nodes to compute a conservative set of visible objects from a current view point; and rendering said conservative set of visible objects.

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Claim 2:
2. The method of claim 1 wherein said one or more occluder nodes are used for any one or more of culling geometry in densely occluded models, region based scene division, and using images to represent far distant geometry.