We’ve already discussed the issues involved with mesh editing. Here we’re interested in a slightly different problem. Suppose that we have a mesh whose vertices are moving over time, say as the result of some physical simulation. How can we effectively represent, compress, approximate, etc. this deforming mesh? Today we’ll be examining some answers to these questions.
Many of the techniques that we’ve discussed in the context of user-driven editing can also be applied in the context of externally-driven deformation. In addition, there are some new approaches more specific to the deformation setting that we’ll want to explore.
Deforming meshes usually consist of a lot of data — we somehow need to keep track of the position of every vertex at every instant in time. Simple PCA techniques are surprisingly useful in cutting down this data to a more manageable size.
Geometry videos extend the geometry image concept to deforming meshes.
Here are a couple of papers that address the issue of level of detail control for deforming meshes.
A. Shamir, C. Bajaj, and V. Pascucci. Multiresolution dynamic meshes with arbitrary deformations. In Proceedings of Visualization 2000, pp. 423–430, October 2000. [PDF]
A. Shamir and V. Pascucci. Temporal and spatial level of details for dynamic meshes. In Proceedings of Virtual Reality Systems and Techniques 2001, pp. 423–430, 2001. [PS.gz]
S. Kircher and M. Garland. Progressive multiresolution meshes for deforming surfaces. In Proceedings of SCA 2005, pp. 191–200, 2005. [PDF]