When creating a central rendering system for all game objects in a given scene I am trying to work out the best way to go about passing the scene to the render system to be rendered.

If I have a scene managed by an arbitrary structure, i.e., an octree, bsp trees, quad-tree, kd tree, etc. What is the best way to pass this to the render system?

The obvious problem is that if simply given the root node of the structure, the render system would require an intrinsic knowledge of the structure in order to traverse the structure.

My solution to this is to clip all objects outside the frustum in the scene manager and then create a list of the objects which are left and pass this simple list to the render system, be it an array, a vector, a linked list, etc. (This would be a structure required by the render system as a means to know which objects should be rendered). The list would of course attempt to minimise OpenGL state changes by grouping objects that require the same rendering operations to be performed on them.

I have been thinking a lot about this and started searching various terms on here and followed any additional information/links but I have not really found a definitive answer. The case may be that there is no definitive answer but I would appreciate some advice and tips.

My question is, is this a reasonable solution to the problem? Are there any improvements that I could make? Are there any caveats I should know about?

Side question: Am I right in assuming that octrees, bsp trees, etc are all forms of BVH?