Abstract: This paper presents work in progress on an automated method for accelerating the rendering of complex static scenes. The technique is general in that it is applicable to unstructured scenes consisting of arbitrary geometric primitives without relying on the presence of specific occlusive qualities in the scene to achieve its speed. Our approach is to place a spatially hierarchical decomposition over the scene and to construct a simplified representation of each cell in the hierarchy that approximates the general appearance of its contents. The scene is then rendered using a traversal of the hierarchy in which a cell's approximation is drawn if it is sufficiently accurate. We apply the method to several scenes, present performance results, and discuss artifacts caused by the approximation. Additionally, we address limitations in the current implementation and present our plans to circumvent these problems.