APPLICATION ERRORS

Many computer graphics applications require complex, highly detailed models to maintain a convincing level of realism. Consequently, models are often created or acquired at a very high resolution to accommodate this need for detail. However, the full complexity of such models is not always required, and since the computational cost of using a model is directly related to its complexity, it is useful to have simpler versions of complex models. Naturally, we would like to automatically produce these simplified models. Recent work on surface simplification algorithms has focused on this goal.

As with most other work in this area, we will focus on the simplification of polygonal models. We will assume that the model consists of triangles only. This implies no loss of generality, since every polygon in the original model can be triangulated as part of a preprocessing wmiprvse.exe high cpu usage phase. To achieve more reliable results, when corners of two faces intersect at a point, the faces should be defined as sharing a single vertex rather than using two separate vertices which happento be coincident in space.Pair contractions do not necessarily preserve the orientation of the faces in the area of the contraction. For instance, it is possible to contract an edge and cause some neighboring faces to fold over on each other. It is usually best to try to avoid this type of mesh inversion.