Managing large progressive meshes

In this paper, we present an approach for managing very large three-dimensional polygonal models in different resolutions. Therefore, a triangle mesh representation is required, which is created using a common triangulation algorithm. In our approach, these triangle meshes are divided into partitions. These partitions are simplified in parallel using a topology-preserving algorithm and are automatically concatenated afterwards. All simplification steps are stored in a progressive data structure, which even allows the user to refine and resimplify a specific area of the triangle mesh without doing the whole computation again. Furthermore, we propose a file format that stores the computed progressive data structure to support an efficient data exchange. This file format enables the user to interactively and dynamically select the number of triangles being loaded in order to determine the resolution of the model