I recently bumped into a post by Roderic Vicaire on the www.gamedev.net forums. It is here.
Obviously there is no generic solution to handle all scene geometry in the same way but depending on the game his naming conventions make a lot of sense (read “Scenegraphs say no” in Tom Forsyth’s blog).
- SpatialGraph: used for finding out what is visible and should be drawn. Should make culling fast
- SceneTree: used for hierarchical animations, e.g. skeletal animation or a sword held in a character’s hand
- RenderQueue: is filled by the SpatialGraph. Renders visible stuff fast. It sorts sub arrays per key, each key holding data such as depth, shaderID etc. (see Christer Ericson’s blog entry “Sort based-draw call bucketing” for this)