Generalized View‐Dependent Simplification

TLDR

We propose a view‑dependent geometry and topology simplification technique for level‑of‑detail rendering of large models, including a cubic‑spline distance metric that unifies vertex positions and normals. The algorithm builds a binary view‑dependence tree of vertex‑pair collapses, limits candidate pairs with a Delaunay edge subset, stores fold‑over constraints implicitly, and uses the tree at run time to generate display triangles while the cubic‑spline metric integrates geometry and topology simplifications. The method reduces memory usage by a factor of two and highly localizes runtime memory accesses.

Abstract

We propose a technique for performing view‐dependent geometry and topology simplifications for level‐of‐detail‐based renderings of large models. The algorithm proceeds by preprocessing the input dataset into a binary tree, the view‐dependence tree of general vertex‐pair collapses. A subset of the Delaunay edges is used to limit the number of vertex pairs considered for topology simplification. Dependencies to avoid mesh foldovers in manifold regions of the input object are stored in the view‐dependence tree in an implicit fashion. We have observed that this not only reduces the space requirements by a factor of two, it also highly localizes the memory accesses at run time. The view‐dependence tree is used at run time to generate the triangles for display. We also propose a cubic‐spline‐based distance metric that can be used to unify the geometry and topology simplifications by considering the vertex positions and normals in an integrated manner.