Progressive Multiresolution Meshes for Deforming Surfaces

Abstract

Time-varying surfaces are ubiquitous in movies, games, and scientific applications. For reasons of efficiency and simplicity of formulation, these surfaces are often generated and represented as dense polygonal meshes with static connectivity. As a result, such deforming meshes often have a tremendous surplus of detail, with many more vertices and polygons than necessary for any given frame. An extensive amount of work has addressed the issue of simplifying a static mesh; however, these methods are inadequate for time-varying surfaces when there is a high degree of non-rigid deformation. We thus propose a new multiresolution representation for deforming surfaces that, together with our dynamic improvement scheme, provides high quality surface approximations at any levelof- detail, for all frames of an animation. Our algorithm also gives rise to a new progressive representation for time-varying multiresolution hierarchies, consisting of a base hierarchy for the initial frame and a sequence of update operations for subsequent frames. We demonstrate that this provides a very effective means of extracting static or view-dependent approximations for a deforming mesh over all frames of an animation.