Many contemporary types of 3D design software use some form of environment mapping, where the environment surrounding the 3D object is rendered to create a panoramic view similar to what we would see in the real world. This not only serves to make the scene look more realistic, but also helps to calculate light effects within the scene. Although environment mapping has been around for a while, and today's methods are highly optimized, they are still not trivially cheap to do, especially on lower end hardware.

Our thesis investigates how an environment mapping method currently in use by our client can be further optimized. This optimization intends to serve two main purposes - to improve performance for clients with lower quality hardware and to allow users to increase texture resolution without extra cost on performance. Two alternative methods are presented, both based somewhat loosely on the idea of occlusion culling. The two approaches are then tested and compared to the original solution in terms of speed, memory utilization and network performance.

Although both approaches show promise and outperform the original solution in some of the tests, they still lack the versatility of the original solution and suffer from some major flaws, making them less appealing alternatives for the general customer. The first approach managed to perform well in all three areas of measurement, but suffers a drawback which limits its use in a real-world scenario. The second approach did not have the same drawback which may make it a more viable option. However, the results of the second approach were not as positive as the first one. With that said, it showed some promise for users who do their rendering on a separate server. While this solution may not yet be viable for the general user, it may serve well for users with more unique needs. To make this approach a viable solution for the general user improvements in regards to rendering speed and GPU utilization will have to be investigated further.