Skip Strips: maintaining triangle strips for view-dependent rendering

TitleSkip Strips: maintaining triangle strips for view-dependent rendering
Publication TypeConference Papers
Year of Publication1999
AuthorsEl-Sana J, Azanli E, Varshney A
Conference NameVisualization '99. Proceedings
Date Published1999/10//
Keywords(computer, Acceleration, acceleration;graphics, applications;path, applications;skip-list-like, changes;view-dependent, compression;rendering, connectivity;triangle, data, datasets;graphics, datasets;static, environments;data, equipment;data, graphic, Graphics, graphics);spatial, hardware;hardware-supported, hierarchy, manner;static, mechanism;immediate-mode, mesh, meshes;triangle, nodes;view-dependent, rendering;view-dependent, simplification;visualization;computer, Skip, Strips;complex, strips;vertex, structure;dynamic, structures;, techniques;retained-mode, triangle, visualisation;rendering
Abstract

View-dependent simplification has emerged as a powerful tool for graphics acceleration in visualization of complex environments. However, view-dependent simplification techniques have not been able to take full advantage of the underlying graphics hardware. Specifically, triangle strips are a widely used hardware-supported mechanism to compactly represent and efficiently render static triangle meshes. However, in a view-dependent framework, the triangle mesh connectivity changes at every frame, making it difficult to use triangle strips. We present a novel data structure, Skip Strip, that efficiently maintains triangle strips during such view-dependent changes. A Skip Strip stores the vertex hierarchy nodes in a skip-list-like manner with path compression. We anticipate that Skip Strips will provide a road map to combine rendering acceleration techniques for static datasets, typical of retained-mode graphics applications, with those for dynamic datasets found in immediate-mode applications.

DOI10.1109/VISUAL.1999.809877