Skip Strips: maintaining triangle strips for view-dependent rendering

Abstract

View-dependent simplification has emerged as a powerful tool for graphics acceleration in visualization of complex environments. However, view-dependent simplification techniques have not been able to take full advantage of the underlying graphics hardware. Specifically, triangle strips are a widely used hardware-supported mechanism to compactly represent and efficiently render static triangle meshes. However, in a view-dependent framework, the triangle mesh connectivity changes at every frame, making it difficult to use triangle strips. We present a novel data structure, Skip Strip, that efficiently maintains triangle strips during such view-dependent changes. A Skip Strip stores the vertex hierarchy nodes in a skip-list-like manner with path compression. We anticipate that Skip Strips will provide a road map to combine rendering acceleration techniques for static datasets, typical of retained-mode graphics applications, with those for dynamic datasets found in immediate-mode applications.