Memory Efficient Adjacent Triangle Connectivity of a Face Using Triangle Strips

We often need to refer to adjacent elements (e.g., vertices, edges and faces) in triangle meshes for rendering, mesh simplification and other processes. It is, however, sometimes impossible to prepare the enormous memory needed to represent element connectivity in gigantic triangle meshes. We proposed a memory efficient scheme for referring to adjacent faces around a vertex in non-manifold triangle meshes [AM04]. But the scheme has a redundancy in case of two-manifold triangle meshes. This paper proposes new schemes for referring to adjacent faces around a face in two-manifold triangle meshes. First, as our previous scheme, we introduce the constraints to allow random access to a triangle in a sequence of triangle strips. Then, for each face, we construct a list of references to adjacent strips as a representation of triangle connectivity. Experimental results show that, compared with conventional indexed triangle set based methods, our schemes reduce total strage for a triangle mesh and adjacent triangle connectivity by less than 50%.