Cutaways and ghosting: satisfying visibility constraints in dynamic 3D illustrations

Abstract

For an illustration to fulfill the purposes for which it is designed, it is often important that certain objects depicted not be blocked by others. We describe an automated approach to the problem of generating illustrations that satisfy a set of visibility constraints for a given viewing specification. We introduce a family of algorithms that automatically identify potentially obscuring objects, and render them using cutaway and ghosting effects modeled after those used by illustrators. These algorithms exploit modern z-buffer-based 3D graphics hardware to make possible dynamic illustrations that maintain a set of visibility constraints as a user interactively updates the viewing specification. © 1992 Springer-Verlag.