A Hierarchy of Techniques for Simplifying Polygonal Models

It is evident from these course notes and their references that there is a tremendous interest in the general area of simplification of polygonal objects. There are several ways in which one can classify the various simplification techniques. One of these is by examining the nature of the performed simplifications. This section of the course will overview some representative techniques from a hierarchy of increasingly aggressive simplification techniques. In Section 2 we overview a popular approach to compress the connectivity information for polygonal objects – by using triangle strips. Section 3 overviews Simplification Envelopes and their features. In Section 4 we overview some of our research in simplifying the genus of an object. Constructing a multiresolution hierarchy is only part of the solution in a level-of-detail-based rendering scheme. Switching levels of detail among different objects and at different regions within the same object is quite important for view-dependent level-of-detail rendering and is discussed in Section 5. Section 6 concludes this part of the course by overviewing some of our experiences in writing software for simplification of real-life objects.