DStrips: dynamic triangle strips for real-time mesh simplification and rendering

DStrips is a simple and efficient method to dynamically manage and generate triangle trips for real-time view dependent multiresolution meshing and rendering. Progressive view-dependent triangle mesh simplification and rendering is an important concept for interactive visualization environments. To minimize the rendering cost, triangle meshes are simplified to the maximal tolerated perceptual error. A further savings can be gained by using hardware optimized rendering primitives such as triangle strips. However, triangle strips have been rarely used successfully in interactive multiresolution meshes due to the costs involved with maintaining the coherency of the strips n the changing mesh. This paper introduces a new dynamic triangle stripping data structure and algorithm. DStrips, that is practical for use with multiresolution meshes. DStrips is aimed at preserving pre-computed triangle strips through changes in the mesh and generating reasonably good triangle strips in real-time. Furthermore, this data structure and algorithm can be easily adapted to any multiresolution mesh which has a face-to-edge/edge-to-face mapping. The presented approach is implemented on top of a real-time view-dependent meshing and rendering framework based on a half-edge data structure using progressive edge collapses and vertex splits. Direct comparisons are made to previous methods in triangle stripification of dynamic and static meshes.