%0 Conference Proceedings %T The 3D Visibility Complex: a unified data-structure for global visibility of scenes of polygons and smooth objects %+ Models, Algorithms and Geometry for Computer Generated Image Graphics (iMAGIS) %A Durand, Frédo %A Drettakis, George %A Puech, Claude %< avec comité de lecture %B 9th Canadian Conference on Computational Geometry (CCCG97) %C Kingston, Canada %8 1997-08-11 %D 1997 %Z Computer Science [cs]/Graphics [cs.GR]Conference papers %X In this paper we describe a unified data-structure, the 3DVisibility Complex which encodes the visibility information of a 3D scene of polygons and smooth convex objects. This datastructure is a partition of the maximal free segments and is based on the characterization of the topological changes of visibility along critical line sets. We show that the size k of the complex is (n) and O(n4) and we give an output sensitive algorithm to build it in time O((n3 + k) log n). This theoretical work has already been used to define a practical data-structure, the Visibility Skeleton described in a companion paper. %G English %2 https://inria.hal.science/inria-00510106/document %2 https://inria.hal.science/inria-00510106/file/cccg97.pdf %L inria-00510106 %U https://inria.hal.science/inria-00510106 %~ UGA %~ IMAG %~ CNRS %~ INRIA %~ UNIV-GRENOBLE1 %~ INPG %~ INRIA-RHA %~ INRIA_TEST %~ TESTALAIN1 %~ INRIA2 %~ INRIA-RENGRE