PVS

From DmWiki

PVS (Potentially Visible Set) is a general name for techniques used by 3D engines to compute visibility in a 3D scene. For a given point the PVS includes what is "potentially" visible from that point, i.e. it attempts to cut down the number of objects that need to be rendered, but is not capable of making exact visibility decisions, and so includes objects that may not actually be visible. Often the computation of the PVS (depending on which method is used) is a lengthy process that is done off-line and used after being compressed. Using a PVS to help rendering greatly improves performance since it removes all the meshes that are occluded completly by other larger meshes. PVS can be used with any spatial subdivision scheme of the scene.

For example, the Quake engines use a precomputed Binary Space Partition (BSP) PVS. It stores in each BSP leaf node the set of leaves visible from that node.

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