Method and apparatus for providing continuous level of detail

TLDR: In this article, an off-line framework for the generation of continuous LODs is presented. Butler et al. use a topological adjacency representation to support both LOD construction and optimized rendering.

Abstract: A method and apparatus that provides for off-line generation of, and run-time evaluation for, continuous LODs. The off-line multiresolution generation process is modified and constrained such that a progressive mesh representation for continuous LODs is created that allows properly designed run-time topological data structures to be overloaded to support both LOD construction and optimized rendering. More specifically, the offline generation process initially preprocesses the mesh to generate a triangle-fan covering composed of only complete cycles. The multiresolution generation process is then constrained to maintain this complete cycle covering for every interim mesh. For run-time evaluation, a topological adjacency representation is used that can serve dual uses. This supportive run-time representation is partitioned so as to allow efficient access by the renderer to the subset of the adjacency information that is the fan covering. The multiresolution representation can be generated so as to allow discontinuities to be rendered at some cost to rendering performance.