Real-time Multi-resolution Modeling for Complex Virtual Environments

The rendering and animation of complex scenes containing many objects represented by large numbers of display primitives requires time proportional to the total number of primitives in the scene. To improve the performance of a given graphics engine, multi-resolution modeling techniques are usually used to reduce the total number of primitives required to be rendered. However, existing techniques are usually slow and some of them may not even preserve the topology of the object geometry faithfully. In this paper, we present an efficient and simple algorithm to generate an object model of the desired resolution given a high resolution model of an object and the distance of the object from the view point. The major advantages of the new method are that it preserves the topology of the given model, it can be used to generate multi-resolution models on the fly and in real-time, and its performance is predictable. The last advantage makes it well fit into the framework that we proposed m our work on real-time rendering in virtual reality[1]. © 1996 ACM.