DStrips: Dynamic Triangle Strips for Real-Time Mesh Simplification and Rendering

Abstract

Multiresolution modelling techniques are important to cope with the increasingly complex polygonal models available today such as high-resolution isosurfaces, large terrains, and complex digitized shapes 10. Large triangle meshes are difficult to render at interactive frame rates due to the large number of vertices to be processed by the graphics hardware. Level-of-detail (LOD) based visualization techniques 7 allow rendering the same object using triangle meshes of variable complexity. Thus, the number of processed vertices is adjusted according to the object’s relative position and importance in the rendered scene. Many mesh simplification and multiresolution triangulation methods 5, 8, 4, 11, 12 have been developed to create different LODs, sequence of LODmeshes, and hierarchical triangulations for LOD based rendering. Although reducing the amount of geometry sent to the graphics pipeline elicits a performance gain, a further optimization can be achieved by the use of optimized rendering primitives, such as triangle strips.