This is probably really dumb so I’ll try to explain what I mean.
If I’m playing BOTW, for example, and I walk past a tree so, from my camera angle, it is no longer visible, what does the computer do graphically to the data/information about that tree? I’m always just amazed walking round these incredibly detailed worlds and being able to move/change directions/change camera angles and the whole thing is usually seamless.
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Ive tried building my own rendering system before, and have also worked with optimization mods for Minecraft, so thats my only source, but here’s what I know:
So basically, the most primitive form of rendering takes an object and puts all of its points through a math equation. These points have 3 coordinate values and the equation maps them to a 2d screen. In simpler terms, it takes in 3 coordinate numbers, 3 camera position numbers, and 2 camera angle (you only need 2 angles for an entire sphere of rotation) and gives out 2 screen coordinates. (These are all the pixels on your screen)
I actually know nothing about how complex models are stored in files, because my only experience is Minecraft which is just simple voxel styled models. But the rendering program also can draw triangles between these and fill them in on screen, if it knows two 2d points it can easily draw a line, repeat that and fill it in for a triangle. It can also texturemap this and color it which is a whole pandoras box of problems and solutions.
But imagine how slow it would be to do this for EVERY single object. So optimizations are made to tell if certain objects are covered up by others or if they are out of the FoV of the camera. And games also implement render distance for this.
As far as what the game does with the data, it keeps it in the files containing every object. To draw on the screen it just reads from this,
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