Hidden Surface Removal!

Hi!

Im using OpenGL to draw a large set of polygons to screen. It all works fine but the solution can be a lot faster. I’ve got hundreds of small peaces in the model that never shows up but they are loaded by my software each time from the source file format.

What is the easiest way to remove all non-visible data? could somebody please point me in the right direction? BSP Trees? Z-Depth, Possible to use OpenGL?

Basically I want to optmize the polygon model and write a “light” version of it to disk. Problem is that I need good way to get if an object (a set of polygons) is visible or not in the scene/world. I need to get info about what has been drawn! And not just see that it has been drawn!

All help and feedback is appreciated!

// J

Occlusion queries are what you are looking for. Check the latest gl spec and the forum as they have already been discussed quite a bit.