Memory efficient adjacent triangle connectivity of a vertex using triangle strips

Abstract

We often need to refer to adjacent elements (e.g., vertices, edges and triangles) in triangle meshes for rendering, mesh simplification and other processes. It is, however, sometimes impossible to prepare the enormous memory needed to represent element connectivity in gigantic triangle meshes. This paper proposes a new scheme for referring to adjacent triangles around a vertex in nonmanifold triangle meshes. First, we introduce the constraints to allow random access to a triangle in a sequence of triangle strips. Then, for each vertex, we construct a list of references to its adjacent strips as a representation of triangle connectivity. Experimental results show that, compared to conventional methods, our scheme can reduce the total size of a triangle mesh and adjacent triangle connectivity to about 50%