Original Post
Hello. I have all of my plans for my render queue ready except for one detail. When should I cull the objects (consider that a single full-screen render may involve multiple cameras to allow effects such as shadow-maps and “video” textures)? There are 2 options I can see: #1: I cull before I submit them to be rendered. This allows me to take advantage of bounding-volume hierarchies so I can avoid testing objects if their parents already failed testing. But I need to know which camera will be used for the render before I submit. #2: Submit everything that is visible and then cull each object one-by-one for each camera that will be used for that render. Objects will be linear in organization by the time they are culled, so culling a parent no longer automatically culls its children, and there is no efficient way to step down BVH’s. However the rendering engine can use this master list to automatically do all “special” renders needed to generate shadow-maps etc. #3: A hybrid approach. Please explain. Basically my goal is that the game should simply submit graphics to be rendered with as little effort as possible. If I take approach #2, this is achieved, but it will be much slower at culling objects from view. If I take approach #1, I have to somehow install callbacks into the graphics engine so that it can get a new list of culled objects when it needs to make a render to a shadow texture or anything else aside from the camera I intend to use for the main render. This seems cumbersome and I think it will make the engine a pain to use. What are your suggestions? Regards, L. Spiro
