Multi-grained Level of Detail for Rendering Complex Meshes Using a Hierarchical Seamless Texture Atlas

Previous algorithms for view-dependent level of detail provide local mesh refinements either at the finest granularity or at a fixed, coarse granularity. The former minimizes the triangles to error ratio, often at the expense of heavy CPU usage and low triangle rendering throughput; the latter improves CPU usage and rendering throughput at the expense of the triangles to error ratio. We present a new multiresolution hierarchy and associated algorithms that provide adaptive granularity. This multi-grained hierarchy allows independent control of the number of hierarchy nodes processed on the CPU and the number of triangles to be rendered. We employ a seamless texture atlas style of geometry image as a GPU-friendly data organization, enabling efficient rendering and GPU-based stitching of patch borders. We demonstrate our approach on both large triangle meshes and terrains with up to billions of vertices. CR Categories: I.3.3 [Computer Graphics]: Picture/Image Generation—Viewing algorithms; I.3.5 [Computer Graphics]: Computational Geometry and Object Modeling—Geometric algorithms, object hierarchies