Rendering continuous level-of-detail meshes by Masking Strips

In this paper we present a new continuous multiresolution approach which has been developed for the interactive visualization of meshes in real-time applications. Our interest is to offer an efficient solution which considers submeshes, textures, normals and bones for skeletal animations. The model has been designed to give view-independent continuous levels-of-detail and uses triangle strips for exploiting vertex cache and coherence for minimizing bus traffic. Furthermore, its data structures allow for an efficient extraction process where all unnecessary information is eliminated and also for progressive transmission. A new simplification strategy has also been developed, which preserves appearance and attributes. In the results section we present different images to show the visual quality obtained with this simplification method, as well as a study of the storage and rendering costs.