Generating high-quality discrete LOD meshes for 3D computer games in linear time

Abstract

The real-time interactive 3D multimedia applications such as 3D computer games and virtual reality (VR) have become prominent multimedia applications in recent years. In these applications, both visual fidelity and degree of interactivity are usually crucial to the success or failure of employment. Although the visual fidelity can be increased using more polygons for representing an object, it takes a higher rendering cost and adversely affects the rendering efficiency. To balance between the visual quality and the rendering efficiency, a set of level-of-detail (LOD) meshes has to be generated in advance. In this paper, we propose a highly efficient polygonal mesh simplification algorithm that is capable of generating a set of high-quality discrete LOD meshes in linear run time. The new algorithm adopts memoryless vertex quadric computation, and suggests the use of constant size replacement selection minheap, pipelined simplification, two-stage optimization, and a new hole-filling scheme, which enable it to generate very high-quality LOD meshes using relatively small amount of main memory space in linear runtime.

Simplification of Polygonal Models for Distributed Visualization

“…We use the greedy framework with local replacement selection heap [3] because of its memory and time efficiency. We propose the error metric that is used to approximate the error introduced by half edge collapse and is based on distance and normal field deviation.…”

“…The greedy framework with global heap, employed in [1], [2], [5], [15], produces high quality approximations, but its disadvantages are large memory overhead and large computation time. Using the greedy framework with local heap, as in [3], [4], is more memory and time efficient since the heap size is fixed regardless of the model size, but it may produce less quality approximations. Another alternative is the multiple choice framework, employed in [16]; it re-computes the previously calculated cost of simplification operations, which is the waste of time.…”

Efficient Simplification Methods for Generating High Quality LODs of 3D Meshes

“…Other frameworks such as local RS-heap [24,25] and multiple-choice approach [26] can also be adopted easily and will result in even more efficiency.…”