View-Dependent Multiresolution Modeling on the GPU

Abstract

For more than a decade, researchers working on level-of-detail techniques have oriented their efforts toward developing better frameworks and adapting their solutions to new hardware. Nevertheless, we believe there is still a gap for efficient yet simple multiresolution models that fully exploit the potential of current GPUs. In this paper we present a level-of-detail framework based on moving the extraction process from updating indices to updating vertices. This feature enables us to perform culling and geomorphing on a vertex basis. Furthermore, it simplifies the update of indices to eliminate degenerate information. The model is capable of offering both uniform and variable resolution and to achieve the latter, a silhouette-based criterion has been included. Finally, we would like to highlight that the model is completely integrated in the GPU and no CPU/GPU communication is necessary once all the information is correctly loaded in hardware memory.