Quadrilateral meshes stripification

Abstract

Quadrilateral models are becoming very popular in many applications of computer graphics (e.g. computer animation, computer games, scienti c visualization of volumetric data, etc.). The complexity of these models can be very high (even millions of quadrilaterals), thus the problem of fast visualization of these meshes is often being solved. To increase the speed one can use some techniques to avoid sending of unnecessary faces (e.g., visibility culling) or some kind of simpli cation of complex objects (e.g., (C)LOD). Still it is important to reduce the time needed to transmit the set of faces by compressing the topological information and decompressing at the rendering stage. One of popular approaches is to convert the quadrilateral mesh to the triangle mesh and render this mesh using strips of triangles. Using the strips, one can reduce the number of vertices sent to the rendering pipeline as two neighboring triangles in a strip share an edge and it is not necessary to send these vertices twice. In this paper we present a new triangle stripping algorithm, designed for quadrilateral meshes. As this algorithm searches for a strip of quadrilaterals and splits them in the nal stage it produces a high quality stripi cation.