Compression-Domain Parallel Rendering

Three dimensional triangle mesh is the dominant representation used in parallel rendering of 3D geometric models. However, explosive growth in the complexity of the mesh-based 3D models overwhelms the communication bandwidth of existing parallel rendering systems. An effective solution to this problem is to use a compressed mesh representation. In recent years, researchers have shown a great deal of interest in developing highly efficient mesh compression algorithms. However, using compressed mesh in the parallel rendering architecture to achieve highest end-to-end performance is a largely unexplored area. We have earlier developed an efficient mesh compression/decompression algorithm, called Breadth First Traversal (BFT) [3, 4]. In this work, we design and implement a parallel rendering architecture that can use a BFT mesh representation. The enabling technology is a novel algorithm that can perform a compression-domain subdivision of the BFT mesh for bandwidth-efficient distribution of submeshes to parallel processors. Parallel rendering using BFT mesh reduces the communication requirement to about one third of that of uncompressed representation.