An Improved Adjacency Data Structure for Fast Triangle Stripping

To speed up the rendering of polygonal meshes, triangle strips are commonly used to reduce the number of vertices sent to the graphics subsystem by exploiting the fact that adjacent triangles share an edge. In this paper, we present an improved adjacency data structure for fast triangle stripping algorithms. There are three major contributions: first, the data structure can be created quickly and robustly from any indexed face set; second, its cache-friendly layout is specifically designed to efficiently answer common stripping queries, such as neighbor finding and least-degree triangle finding, in constant time; third, the stripping algorithm operates in-place, since strips are created by simply relinking pointers. An implementation of a stripping algorithm shows a significant speed-up compared to other implementations. Our implementation is publicly available as part of OpenSG [9].