Patch-Trees for Fast Level-of-Detail Synthesis

Abstract

This paper describes a procedure that synthesizes Level-of-Detail (LoD) meshes from a tree of mesh-patches. The patch tree stores the surface of the original mesh in different detail levels. The leaf patches represent the original detail, while lower levels in the tree represent the geometry of their child nodes with less detail. Such patch trees have a coarser granularity compared to basic approaches like “edge-collapse”. This is because only complete patches can switch their detail, instead of pairs of triangles. On the other hand, it can better utilize the graphics hardware, which is capable to render preloaded patches very fast. The problem of such a patchbased LoD approach is to join the patches of different resolutions together in a smooth mesh. This problem is solved by the use of different versions of the patch borders that depend on the detail level of the neighbor patches.