Progressive meshes

This paper introduces the progressive mesh (PM) representation, a new scheme for storing and transmitting arbitrary triangle meshes at a time when highly detailed geometric models were becoming commonplace and challenging rendering performance, transmission bandwidth, and storage capacities. The PM representation is efficient, lossless, and continuous-resolution, and it addresses several practical graphics problems at once: smooth geomorphing of level-of-detail approximations, progressive transmission, mesh compression, and selective refinement. The paper also presents a new mesh simplification procedure for constructing a PM representation from any input mesh.

A key aspect of the simplification optimization is that its goal is to preserve not just the geometry of the original mesh but, more importantly, its overall appearance as defined by discrete and scalar appearance attributes such as material identifiers, color values, normals, and texture coordinates. The authors demonstrate construction of the PM representation and its applications using several practical models, establishing a foundational technique for multiresolution mesh handling in computer graphics.