Instant Level-of-Detail

Abstract

Highly detailed models are commonly used in computer games and other interactive rendering applications. In this context, static levels-of-detail are frequently used to achieve real-time frame rates. While this is a simple solution to improve the rendering performance, the additional geometry needs to be stored and loaded into graphics memory. This is especially problematic in online applications, where the data needs to be transmitted over a possibly slow connection. On the other hand, consumer level computers are usually equipped with a graphics card that can be used for general purpose parallel computing. Based on this observation, we propose a high-quality parallel mesh simplification algorithm based on the quadric error metric. The simplification performance can compete with the time required to load additional meshes from a local hard disk.