Out of Core Simplification with Appearance Preservation for Computer Game Applications

A 3D interactive graphics application is an extremely computational demanding paradigm, requiring the simulation and display of a virtual environment at interactive frame rates. It is significant in real time game environment. Even with the use of powerful graphics workstations, a moderately complex virtual environment can involve a vast amount of computation, inducing a noticeable lag into the system. This lag can detrimentally affect the visual effect and may therefore severely compromise the diffusion of the quality of graphics application. This paper introduced to overcome the limitation of conventional technique. Surface attributes such as normal, colors and textures, which are essentials to bring out the beauty of 3D object are preserved and discussed. The first process is to convert the input data into a memory efficient format. Next, the datasets are organized in an octree structure and later the partitioned meshes are kept in secondary memory (hard disk). Subsequently, sub-meshes are simplified using a new variation of vertex clustering technique. In order to maintain the surface attributes, a vertex clustering technique that collapses all triangles in every leaf node using the generalized quadric error metrics is introduced. Unlike any other vertex clustering methods, the knowledge of neighbourhood between nodes is unnecessary and the node simplification is performed independently. Overall, the proposed algorithm is capable in simplifying large datasets with pleasant quality and relatively fast. The system can run efficiently on low cost personal computer with small memory footprint.