Skip strips: maintaining triangle strips for view-dependent rendering (original) (raw)

Efficiently computing and updating triangle strips for real-time rendering

Computer-aided Design, 2000

Triangle strips are a widely used hardware-supported data-structure to compactly represent and efficiently render polygonal meshes. In this paper we survey the efficient generation of triangle strips as well as their variants. We present efficient algorithms for partitioning polygonal meshes into triangle strips. Triangle strips have traditionally used a buffer size of two vertices. In this paper we also study the impact of larger buffer sizes and various queuing disciplines on the effectiveness of triangle strips. View-dependent simplification has emerged as a powerful tool for graphics acceleration in visualization of complex environments. However, in a view-dependent framework the triangle mesh connectivity changes at every frame making it difficult to use triangle strips. In this paper 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.

Optimizing triangle strips for fast rendering

1996

Almost all scientific visualization involving surfaces is currently done via triangles. The speed at which such triangulated surfaces can be displayed is crucial to interactive visualization and is bounded by the rate at which triangulated data can be sent to the graphics subsystem for rendering. Partitioning polygonal models into triangle strips can significantly reduce rendering times over transmitting each triangle individually.

Single-strips for fast interactive rendering

The Visual Computer, 2006

Representing a triangulated two manifold using a single triangle strip is an NP-complete problem. By introducing a few Steiner vertices, recent works find such a single-strip, and hence a linear ordering of edge-connected triangles of the entire triangulation. In this paper, we extend previous results [10] that exploit this linear ordering in efficient triangle-strip management for high-performance rendering. We present new algorithms to generate single-strip representations that follow different user defined constraints or preferences in the form of edge weights. These functional constraints are application dependent. For example, normal-based constraints can be used for efficient rendering after visibility culling, or spatial constraints for highly coherent vertex-caching. We highlight the flexibility of this approach by generating single-strips with preferences as arbitrary as the orientation of the edges. We also present a hierarchical single-strip management strategy for high-performance interactive 3D rendering.

Efficiently using connectivity information between triangles in a mesh for real-time rendering

Future Generation Computer Systems, 2004

Triangle meshes are the most popular standard model used to represent polygonal surfaces. Drawing these meshes as a set of independent triangles involves sending a vast amount of information to the graphics system. Taking advantage of the connectivity information between the triangles in a mesh dramatically diminishes the amount of information the graphics system must handle. Multiresolution Triangle Strips (MTS) represent a triangle mesh as a collection of multiresolution triangles strips. These strips are the basis of both the storage and the rendering stage. The coherence between the extraction of two levels of detail is used in the model in order to decrease the visualisation time.

Efficient Implementation of Multiresolution Triangle Strips

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2002

Triangle meshes are currently the most popular standard model to represent polygonal surfaces. Drawing these meshes as a set of independent triangles involves sending a vast amount of information to the graphic engine. It has been shown that using drawing primitives, such as triangle fans or strips, dramatically reduces the amount of information. Multiresolution Triangle Strips (MTS) uses the connectivity information to represent a mesh as a set of multiresolution triangles strips. These strips are the basis of both the storage and rendering stages. They allow the efficient management of a wide range of levels of detail. In this paper, we have taken advantage of the coherence property between two levels of detail to decrease the visualisation time. MTS has been compared against Progressive Meshes and Multiresolution Ordered Meshes with Fans, the only model that uses the triangle fan as an alternative to the triangle primitive. In all cases, Multiresolution Triangle Strips obtains a better frame rate.

Dependency-Free Parallel Progressive Meshes

Computer Graphics Forum, 2012

The constantly increasing complexity of polygonal models in interactive applications poses two major problems. First, the number of primitives that can be rendered at real-time frame rates is currently limited to a few million. Secondly, less than 45 million triangles-with vertices and normal-can be stored per gigabyte. Although the rendering time can be reduced using level-of-detail (LOD) algorithms, representing a model at different complexity levels, these often even increase memory consumption. Out-of-core algorithms solve this problem by transferring the data currently required for rendering from external devices. Compression techniques are commonly used because of the limited bandwidth. The main problem of compression and decompression algorithms is the only coarse-grained random access. A similar problem occurs in view-dependent LOD techniques. Because of the interdependency of split operations, the adaption rate is reduced leading to visible popping artefacts during fast movements. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm for real-time view-dependent rendering of gigabyte-sized models. It is based on a neighbourhood dependency-free progressive mesh data structure. Using a per operation compression method, it is suitable for parallel random-access decompression and out-of-core memory management without storing decompressed data.

Optimized view-dependent rendering for large polygonal datasets

2002

In this paper we are presenting a novel approach for rendering large datasets in a view-dependent manner. In a typical view-dependent rendering framework, an appropriate level of detail is selected and sent to the graphics hardware for rendering at each frame. In our approach, we have successfully managed to speed up the selection of the level of detail as well as the rendering of the selected levels. We have accelerated the selection of the appropriate level of detail by not scanning active nodes that do not contribute to the incremental update of the selected level of detail. Our idea is based on imposing a spatial subdivision over the view-dependence trees data-structure, which allows spatial tree cells to refine and merge in real-time rendering to comply with the changes in the active nodes list. The rendering of the selected level of detail is accelerated by using vertex arrays. To overcome the dynamic changes in the selected levels of detail we use multiple small vertex arrays whose sizes depend on the memory on the graphics hardware. These multiple vertex arrays are attached to the active cells of the spatial tree and represent the active nodes of these cells. These vertex arrays, which are sent to the graphics hardware at each frame, merge and split with respect to the changes in the cells of the spatial tree.

Efficiently using connectivity information between triangles in a mesh for real-time renderin

Future Generation Computer Systems, 2004

Triangle meshes are the most popular standard model used to represent polygonal surfaces. Drawing these meshes as a set of independent triangles involves sending a vast amount of information to the graphics system. Taking advantage of the connectivity information between the triangles in a mesh dramatically diminishes the amount of information the graphics system must handle. Multiresolution Triangle Strips (MTS) represent a triangle mesh as a collection of multiresolution triangles strips. These strips are the basis of both the storage and the rendering stage. The coherence between the extraction of two levels of detail is used in the model in order to decrease the visualisation time.

External Memory View-Dependent Simplification and Rendering

Computer Graphics Forum, 2000

In this paper, we propose a novel external-memory algorithm to support view-dependent simplification for datasets much larger than main memory. In the preprocessing phase, we use a new spanned sub-meshes simplification technique to build view-dependence trees I/O-efficiently, which preserves the correct edge collapsing order and thus assures the run-time image quality. We further process the resulting view-dependence trees to build the meta-node trees, which can facilitate the run-time level-of-detail rendering and is kept in disk. During run-time navigation, we keep in main memory only the portions of the meta-node trees that are necessary to render the current level of details, plus some prefetched portions that are likely to be needed in the near future. The prefetching prediction takes advantage of the nature of the run-time traversal of the meta-node trees, and is both simple and accurate. We also employ the implicit dependencies for preventing incorrect foldovers, as well as main-memory buffer management and parallel processes scheme to separate the disk accesses from the navigation operations, all in an integrated manner. The experiments show that our approach scales well with respect to the main memory size available, with encouraging preprocessing and run-time rendering speeds and without sacrificing the image quality.

Progressive Meshes

Highly detailed geometric models are rapidly becoming commonplace in computer graphics. These models, often represented as complex triangle meshes, challenge rendering performance, transmission bandwidth, and storage capacities. This paper introduces the progressive mesh (PM) representation, a new scheme for storing and transmitting arbitrary triangle meshes. This efficient, loss-less, continuous-resolution representation addresses several practical problems in graphics: smooth geomorphing of level-of-detail approximations, progressive transmission, mesh compression, and selective refinement. In addition, we present a new mesh simplification procedure for constructing a PM representation from an arbitrary mesh. The goal of this optimization procedure is to preserve not just the geometry of the original mesh, but more importantly its overall appearance as defined by its discrete and scalar appearance attributes such as material identifiers, color values, normals, and texture coordinates. We demonstrate construction of the PM representation and its applications using several practical models.