Out-of-core construction and visualization of multiresolution surfaces

• Authors: Peter Lindstrom
• Venue: I3D '03 Proceedings of the 2003 symposium on Interactive 3D graphics
• Year: 2003

We present a method for end-to-end out-of-core simplification and view-dependent visualization of large surfaces. The method consists of three phases: (1) memory insensitive simplification; (2) memory insensitive construction of a multiresolution hierarchy; and (3) run-time, output-sensitive, view-dependent rendering and navigation of the mesh. The first two off-line phases are performed entirely on disk, and use only a small, constant amount of memory, whereas the run-time system pages in only the rendered parts of the mesh in a cache coherent manner. As a result, we are able to process and visualize arbitrarily large meshes given a sufficient amount of disk space; a constant multiple of the size of the input mesh.Similar to recent work on out-of-core simplification, our memory insensitive method uses vertex clustering on a rectilinear octree grid to coarsen and create a hierarchy for the mesh, and a quadric error metric to choose vertex positions at all levels of resolution. We show how the quadric information can be used to concisely represent vertex position, surface normal, error, and curvature information for anisotropic view-dependent coarsening and silhouette preservation.The run-time component of our system uses asynchronous rendering and view-dependent refinement driven by screen-space error and visibility. The system exploits frame-to-frame coherence and has been designed to allow preemptive refinement at the granularity of individual vertices to support refinement on a time budget.Our results indicate a significant improvement in processing speed over previous methods for out-of-core multiresolution surface construction. Meanwhile, all phases of the method are disk and memory efficient, and are fairly straightforward to implement.