GAPS: General and Automatic Polygonal Simplification

We present a new approach for simplifying polygonal objects. Our method is general in that it accepts models that contain both non-manifold geometry and surface attributes. It is automatic since it requires no user input to execute and returns approximate error bounds used to calculate switching distances between levels of detail, or LODs. Our algorithm, called General and Automatic Polygonal Simplification, or GAPS for short, uses an adaptive distance threshold and surface area preservation along with a quadric error metric to join unconnected regions of an object. Its name comes from this ability to "fill in the gaps" of an object. Our algorithm combines approximations of geometric and surface attribute error to produce a unified object space error metric. GAPS can efficiently produce high quality and drastic approximations of a wide variety of objects, including complicated pipe structures. This ability to perform drastic simplification allows us to create levels of detail to accel..