Shrinking Levels of Generic Progressive Meshes With Triangle Budget or Error Control

Abstract

In modern virtual reality applications in electrical commerce or virtual environments, triangular meshes are often considered to be multi-resolutional for transmitting and displaying complex models through Internet or rendering large-scaled scenes in real-time. There are already some mesh simplification algorithms developed to generate progressive meshes that convert a single resolution triangular mesh into a base mesh with a sequence of refinement operations. Sometimes the length of sequence might be too long and the geometric modification of a single refinement step might be too slight. In this paper, we present a generic progressive mesh representation so that we can convert progressive meshes generated by different algorithms into the same representation. We also present a series of post-processing rules to shrink the refinement sequences of generic progressive meshes with the triangle budget or error controlled for each level. We call the procedure level shrinking. It improves the efficiency of level-of-detail modulation of progressive meshes if they are supposed to be used in real-time rendering systems.