Simplification of Fan-Meshes models for fast rendering of large 3D point-sampled scenes

Abstract

Fan-Meshes (FM) are a kind of geometrical primitives for generating 3D model or scene descriptions that are able to preserve both local geometrical details and topological structures. In this paper, we propose an efficient simplification algorithm for the FM models to achieve fast post-processing and rendering of large models or scenes. Given a global error tolerance for the surface approximation, the algorithm can find an approximately minimal set of FMs that covers the whole model surfaces. As compared with splat-based methods, the FM description has a large simplification rate under the same surface fitting error measurement. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.