Visualizer: a mesh visualization system using view-dependent refinement

Abstract

Arbitrary triangle mesh is a collection of 3D triangles without any shape or boundary restrictions. Progressive mesh (PM) is a multiresolution representation that defines continuous level of detail approximations for arbitrary triangle meshes. PM representation of a mesh can be processed to obtain a mesh approximation between the original and the base (simplified) mesh. Furthermore, PM can be refined in a view-dependent fashion to obtain a simpler mesh within a perceptual image quality. In this paper, we introduce an adaptation and improvements in our implementation for view-dependent refinement of progressive meshes. Essentially, we use a similar approach to Hoppe's framework (ACM Comput. Graphics, Proceedings of SIGGRAPH’97, August 1997, pp. 189–198) for view-dependent refinement with a different algorithm for constructing PM representation. Our method is simple to implement and fast enough to achieve interactive frame rates for moderately complex models (models containing hundreds of thousands of polygons) on a machine with polygon rendering hardware. Moreover, our implementation allows changes to topology and achieves a simpler and sometimes more realistic refinements.