Illumination dependent refinement of multiresolution meshes

Abstract

State of the art multiresolution modeling allows to selectively refine a coarse mesh of an object on the visually important parts. In this way it is possible to render the geometry of a given object accurately with a minimum number of triangles. There are also approaches that use cones of normal vectors to perform illumination dependent selective refinement. This includes the correct rendering of highlights and transitions between lit and unlit areas of an object. The drawback of these approaches is that using only the normal cone for the detection gives only a very poor criteria to detect the problematic cases. Therefore, too much refinement has to be performed which in most cases prevents real time update rates between successive frames. The authors describe a new approach for better estimation of normal deviations between different levels of detail. This allows for accurate lighting with a minimum number of triangles.