Fast display of articulated characters using impostors

Rendering and animating numerous articulated characters interactively is a challenging task in computer graphics. Specific hardware may be needed in order to achieve an interactive rate of display. Alternatively, the display rate can be improved by using impostor. Due to the temporal coherence characteristic of the articulated character in an animation, the change between successive frames remains small. The use of impostor to replace the actual geometry has been shown in many computer graphics systems in the form of billboards. But the objects being used in their demonstrations are mostly static. In this project, the effectiveness of using impostors for animating articulated characters is investigated. We have proposed to solve the visibility problem, which is inherent in the impostor, by using the stencil buffer and bounding box. Comparison is made between our new technique and the multi-layered impostor.