Representing Progressive Dynamic 3D Meshes and Applications

Dynamic 3D mesh sequences, also called 3D animation, have been widely used in the movie and gaming industries. However, the huge storage requirements of dynamic mesh data make it problematic for a number of applications such as rendering, transmission over a network, and displaying on mobile devices. This paper proposes a multi resolution representation of 3D animation that results displaying 3D animation progressively. The proposed method transforms traditional 3D animation representation into progressive representation, which takes up less storage and memory space. The progressive representation is constructed by compressing the animation into a base animation with sequenced refining operators. The base animation is viewable and can be reconstructed by transmitting for only a few seconds, which is also called thumbnail animation in this paper, the more detailed animation can be refined smoothly with applying refining operators. As the results, the resolution of animation can be free to change at real-time, where the resolution can be increased automatically or even controlled by user. Moreover, the progressive animation is more suitable for transmitting and displaying through the network.