Adaptive real-time level-of-detail based rendering for polygonal models

We present an algorithm for performing adaptive real-time level-of-detail-based rendering for triangulated polygonal models. The simplifications are dependent on viewing direction, lighting, and visibility and are performed by taking advantage of image-space, object-space, and frame-to-frame coherences. In contrast to the traditional approaches of precomputing a fixed number of level-of-detail representations for a given object, our approach involves statically generating a continuous level-of-detail representation for the object. This representation is then used at run time to guide the selection of appropriate triangles for display. The list of displayed triangles is updated incrementally from one frame to the next. Our approach is more effective than the current level-of-detail-based rendering approaches for most scientific visualization applications, where there are a limited number of highly complex objects that stay relatively close to the viewer. Our approach is applicable for scalar (such as distance from the viewer) as well as vector (such as normal direction) attributes.