Instance-Aware Simplification of Textured 3D Models

Abstract

Optimization of user generated contents of Virtual Worlds has remained an issue under consideration since the evolution of 3D graphics and such graphical worlds. Numerous approaches have been made in multiple directions to resolve the limitations of shared storage and rendering of such massive data over the network. Additional processing is required to make the data suitable for rendering. This research proposes to work on an improved method of simplifying instanced 3D textured meshes while maintaining their compression due to instancing. Existing mesh simplification algorithms do not account for instancing in their inputs, operating instead on triangle soups or indexed triangle meshes. This makes them unsuitable for highly instanced meshes, since expanding an instanced mesh to an indexed triangle mesh and then simplifying it can result in a larger output file size. The high cost of delivering these larger files over the Internet results in long network latencies and low performance. Recent work on simplifying instanced meshes has shown significant benefits of maintaining instancing [4]. However, they only account for geometry in the mesh, not vertex attributes like texture coordinates and colors. To solve this problem, we propose to implement and evaluate an improved instance-aware version of GAPS algorithm which takes into account textures, normals and colors [3] in indexed triangle meshes. GAPS itself uses the geometry simplification approach of quadric simplification [2] and incorporates vertex attributes into its cost metrics. An instance-aware version of it would be based on the concept that the error of a submesh edge is calculated by considering all the neighboring faces that exist in all instances of the submesh.