Progressive meshes (SIGGRAPH 1996)

[@Myndale]

This brings back a lot of memories. Back in 1998 I was working in the R&D department at Bullfrog Productions and was tasked alongside three other developers to each independently come up with proposals for a level-of-detail system that could be retro-fitted into the upcoming game Dungeon Keeper 2. The constraints were tight and the engine had already been mostly written, so any proposal had to work by changing index buffers only so that fewer triangles got rendered i.e. it couldn't change any of the actual vertex buffer data, which was already being subject to a host of transforms (not the least of which was skinning). On September 11, each of us presented our proposals, along with proof-of-concept demos we'd been working on. The proposals included one that basically eliminated shorter edges first, one that tried to preserve sillhouette edges, and one that required user-assisted hueristics. The system I proposed was based almost entirely on the technique in this paper, albeit modified to account for the fact that vertices couldn't move during edge collapses (turns out that minimization of the energy metric for a given edge works just as well when one vertex collapses to the other). The result of that meeting was that my proposal was the one selected for the project, and while the overall polygon reduction was a modest 25%, it was considered a phenomenal success given the extreme constraints of the problem coupled with the fact that the polygon counts of the models had already been hand-optimized by the art team as far as they thought possible.

[@HuguesHoppe]

Fun to hear about this; thanks for sharing!

[@andrewcassidy1790]

It's amazing to compare this to modern technology. 150k tris was once considered a lot!

[@jojolafrite90]

Watching this in 2018! Kind of amazing.

[@JustAboutOk]

This is soo amazing! you can change the polycount!! I used this on Maya today 2018

[@blank2707]

Can we all just appreciate how relaxing the BGM is :-).

[@johnsherfey3675]

How lod is done.

[@davidwebster4457]

awesome.

[@layoutgames-boris3481]

The only thing that I'm impressed is the geomorph transitions. I have no ideia how to do that lol xD

[@bpisbp2]

using morphing ie blend between corresponding vertices of two LODs.

[@jiajuntang9760]

orz.