Efficiently computing and updating triangle strips for real-time rendering (original) (raw)

Skip strips: maintaining triangle strips for view-dependent rendering

1999

View-dependent simplification has emerged as a powerful tool for graphics acceleration in visualization of complex environments. However, view-dependent simplification techniques have not been able to take full advantage of the underlying graphics hardware. Specifically, triangle strips are a widely used hardware-supported mechanism to compactly represent and efficiently render static triangle meshes. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A Mesh Data Structure for Rendering and Subdivision

Generating subdivision surfaces from polygonal meshes requires the complete topological information of the original mesh, in order to find the neighbouring faces, and vertices used in the subdivision computations. Normally, winged-edge type data-structures are used to maintain such information about a mesh. For rendering meshes, most of the topological information is irrelevant, and winged-edge type data-structures are inefficient due to their extensive use of dynamical data structures. A standard approach is the extraction of a rendering mesh from the winged-edge type data structure, thereby increasing the memory footprint significantly. We introduce a mesh data-structure that is efficient for both tasks: creating subdivision surfaces as well as fast rendering. The new data structure maintains full topological information in an efficient and easily accessible manner, with all information necessary for rendering optimally suited for current graphics hardware. This is possible by dis...

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.