A DYNAMIC MULTILEVEL LIGHT METHOD IN LARGE SCALE VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENT

A new dynamic multilevel light method for generating realistic illuminating effects in a large scale virtual environment is presented. This new method allows each illuminant have several levels of light, such as point light, local light, spotlight, entirely environmental light, and so on. According to the requirements of simulation, the illuminant uses tunable parameters to select a more economical level of light from all its levels in some time during the simulation. This new method also utilizes quadtrees to fleetly find objects illuminated by certain level of light, to load correct models at multiple LOD, and to calculate the critical values.