Mesh Simplification for Interactive Applications

González,C., Gumbau,J., Chover,M., Castelló,P.

Abstract:
Meshes used in real-time applications are usually composed by sub-meshes which contain vertices with different sets of attributes. This kind of meshes can not be directly used in the current graphics pipeline architecture, because meshes for interactive applications usually duplicate vertices to ensure that every vertex has a single set of attributes. This fact causes apparent contiguous surfaces to be split into pieces or patches, so that traditional simplification error metrics will fail trying to simplify them. A method for this kind of meshes is presented. It is based on edge collapses and takes into account the information of attributes that contribute to obtain a more realistic appearance of the object, like normals and texture coordinates, in the error metric and recalculating this information after the simplification steps.