A digital mock-up visualization system capable of processing giga-scale CAD models

In the automotive, aerospace and naval industries, digital mock-up tools are always used for assembly examination, layout examination and interference checking. Generally, a digital mock-up is assembled from giga-scale CAD models. Because of limitations of computer hardware resources, a digital mock-up represented by traditional planar facets is too large to load into a computer’s memory for rendering. This article proposes a new geometric compression representation to represent given CAD models with curved triangular patches. Based on the compression representation, our digital mock-up visualization system can import several giga-scale CAD models into a computer’s memory simultaneously. A high performance rendering strategy to display the curved triangular patches is also presented. In the rendering strategy, a dynamic subdivision algorithm is introduced which is different from conventional LOD techniques in order to reduce memory consumption. In addition, an algorithm to convert CAD models to the curved triangular patches is introduced.